The invisible key workers

Will a new designation change how seafarers are treated for the better?

By Michael Grey

If you are a serving seafarer, it may have given you a warm feeling in your heart if you learned recently that the Special Tripartite Committee of the Maritime Labour Convention has recognised you as a ‘key worker’. This ought to qualify seafarers for a range of rights for fair treatment, safe movement, proper medical assistance and shore leave, among several other entitlements due to them.

As always, the practical progress from such international agreements lies in the implementation, which tends to be patchy, to say the least, but the designation of ‘key worker’ surely ought to be regarded as something positive.

Nobody with an ounce of common sense could deny that seafarers deserve such an entitlement, considering what it is that they do, and what might be the global consequences if they all stopped doing it! It was a former Secretary-General of the International Maritime Organization (who had once served afloat) who came up with the assertion that seafarers “feed and fuel the world”, which nicely states the importance of this workforce that few people ever think about.

But you probably need to be a seafarer to realise that in so many places, the treatment of these key workers is far from optimal, as they struggle with visa regulations, have their opportunities for shore leave denied in many ports and are generally treated as second class citizens. Not so many years ago I saw a ship’s crew waiting patiently at an airport (I will not name the country) for all the ‘normal’ passengers – the tourists and ‘business’ people – to be passed through immigration. It was far from unusual treatment, one of them confided, and there was nothing to be done, he said. You just shrug and wait for the official procedures to work through.

Shore leave rights

The matter of shore leave is another area where there is huge room for improvement with all sorts of imaginative reasons cooked up by officialdom as to why it should be denied. With small, hard-working crews, it is hard enough to get a few hours off, and it is very easy for the officials or port or terminal managers to say no. Of course they don’t want people wandering around hazardous terminals, and just a few seafarers wanting access to the nearest shops is just too difficult to arrange. We saw this during the pandemic, but the bad habits have not entirely gone away in many places.

And why do these key workers have to jump through all sorts of hoops with visa regulations, just to get from A to B to join a ship, many of them involving both time and expense? They are seafarers ‘in transit’, for goodness sake, and their journey should be facilitated, not snarled up with arguments in Immigration. In a sensible world, where the role of seafarers was properly understood, it would be sufficient for a seafarer to present a Seafarer Identity Document to validate their journey with the authorities.

In the dim and distant past, a ‘Seaman’s Card’ was an accepted alternative to a passport, validated by the Seaman’s Identity Documents Convention 1958, as adopted by the ILO in that year. It provided a photograph and details of the holder, and that was considered enough. Surely an electronic successor would do the trick today, organised with enormous efficiency by one of the major international card companies. The million and three quarters seafaring workforce would be a piece of cake to organisations accustomed to documenting hundreds of millions of individuals around the world.

In the end, it is all about numbers and visibility and the trouble is that seafarers are largely invisible and there are just not enough of them to produce the waves of necessary change within governments and officialdom. But key workers ought to have the expectation that they will be treated well. We must just wait and see how consequential any changes might be.