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Below Deck: Filipinos make up nearly a third of all cruise ship workers

story.californiasunday.com

101–110 of 209 posts

Re: Below Deck: Filipinos make up nearly a third of all cruise ship workers

#101
post #14

The sad thing is that while he was able to earn $1,500 per month, he apparently didn't invest into anything. No financial planning as if he can do this job forever. Sure he must have known stories what's going on and could prepare for this possibility. I don't understand why he didn't.

"Financial planning", in the western sense of the phrase (saving currency, investing in stocks, mutual funds, life insurance, 401(k), and various other pieces of paper that require trust and courts to be worth anything) isn't actually a rational thing to do in emerging Asia (or, to the extent that it is now, that's very recent). We're talking about a country that was governed by a prolific kleptocrat (Ferdinand Marco…

Index funds, 401k and some stocks exist only in the USA.

They don't exist in most of the western world (e.g. Europe).

Please don't call that "western financial planning"

Re: Below Deck: Filipinos make up nearly a third of all cruise ship workers

#102
post #31
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't you work more than 10 hours per day? Is that a labor law in ship's flag country?

Probably the 91 hour per week limit the article mentioned, if they were clocking 12 to 14hr shifts they would meet or break that maximum hourly limit often. Those are insane work hours!

The 91 hour limit comes from the MLC:

"Rest hours: rest hours should be implemented in national legislation. The maximum hours of work in that legislation should not exceed 14 hours in any 24-hour period and 72 hours in any seven-day period, or: at least ten hours of rest in any 24-hour period and 77 hours (rest) in any seven-day period. Furthermore, the daily hours of rest may not be divided into more than two periods and, at least six hours of rest should be given consecutively in one of those two periods."

7*24-77 = 91

Re: Below Deck: Filipinos make up nearly a third of all cruise ship workers

#104
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disney cruise was awesome, on one of the big new ships. I would recommend.

Ironically, Disney Cruises is owned by...Carnival.

This is FAKE NEWS! Disney Cruise Line is not owned by Carnival, but rather by Walt Disney Parks & Resorts.

Re: Below Deck: Filipinos make up nearly a third of all cruise ship workers

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of expected when in the US you have a culture of "everyone has to go to university or you are worthless".

I'd probably make the argument that it's an overemphasis on the principles of supply and demand (capitalism) that make one potentially worthless. If there are enough geographers with graduate degrees applying for the gig even at minimum wage pay, you pay them minimum wage. In the US (and let's be real, most of the world), capitalism trumps altruism (paying someone more than their market value because you're nice). We…

You see exploitation, I see a market signal to high schoolers and undergraduates telling them we have enough graduate-level geographers, encouraging them to pursue something else and eventually making us all more prosperous in the future.

Re: Below Deck: Filipinos make up nearly a third of all cruise ship workers

#106
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An unskilled operational role. I worked for outsourcers before as well doing support type jobs. Bad pay, ever increasing performance pressure, no benefits (no sick pay or health insurance), so if you got sick you were shit out of luck and healthcare was prohibitively expensive. Private insurance was available of course but these were all angle shooting companies in the affordable range that are barely better than hav…

>This was in western Europe. Most western Europe has socialized medicine. Was health insurance as essential as in the USA?

Germany doesn't, for example. You have private ensurance companies and you have to chose one. When things go bad, you bet the insurance company won't be on your side. It's all ok if you have a good job (IT or otherwise) that pays for the best, but for poorer people it sucks.

Re: Below Deck: Filipinos make up nearly a third of all cruise ship workers

#107
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me overly cynical, but the future is looking even worse with ever increasing automation. There will most likely be a small elite of technocrats and wealthy while everybody else is living in shacks competing for whatever jobs are left. Most single millenial guys that aren't in tech or another high paying career are already living in shared housing indefinetely if they're in a big city. An excess of people having…

Shared housing isn't bad in principle. It was only some decades ago that most people didn't own a single-family freestanding home. I hope that when I'm old I can live with all my friends in a big shared home, rather than a nursing home.

Did you ever watch the cartoons growing up, like _Hey, Arnold_ on Nickelodeon? Remember how Arnold's family ran a boarding house, with shared common spaces and bunch of people renting rooms (for years at a time!) and a diversity of humanity to provide Humanity, different perspectives, and other such forms of Color for the show?

Did you ever stop think about how weird that arrangement was? Do you know anyone who owns, operates, or lives in a boarding house?

And yet it's not really all that weird by historical standards. It's only in fairly recent times that cities decided to get all Moralistic about how Home, Family and Neighborhoods Should Be Structured and started imposing zoning restrictions with super emphasis on homes, waging war against boarding houses and residential hotels and flophouses and other haunts of the poor and lower classes in the name of Progress and Class Warfare. Can't quite afford a place that meets the minimum square footage requirements independently? Well, don't worry, we can find a place for you in the crime-ridden public housing projects or on the streets. Kiss your remaining independence goodbye and welcome to the Bureaucracy, because you're never going to be able to get on the bus to a new town with $100 in your pocket and find a place to crash for a few nights until you get a new job. Who would rent you a place like that anymore? There's the YMCA... and that's about it, _period_.

(Hell, a lot of the debates about AirBnB "abuse" end up rehashing these same problems.)

Re: Below Deck: Filipinos make up nearly a third of all cruise ship workers

#108
post #46
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with tips that could reach to 2k if you always work overtime and not complain about the lack of extra pay How does a dishwasher make tips?

Only waiters get their share from the tips. I've spoken to waiters (mostly filipino) during a cruise and the $50 monthly excluding tips is real. I made a typo in my above comment. As a dishwasher, you get $450/month - fixed and without tips.

That's more plausible.

I assume also room and board are "free".

Re: Below Deck: Filipinos make up nearly a third of all cruise ship workers

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't want to dox myself, but you can probably guess which western European country doesn't. Maybe this is supposed to be an easy question, but as an American, I have no idea which western European country doesn't have socialized medicine, and Wikipedia is not helping me out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_univers...

I believe Belarus is the only European one without it, Google wasn't giving me a good list of "nos", but I found a map indicating as much..

Belarus is definitely not Western Europe.

Re: Below Deck: Filipinos make up nearly a third of all cruise ship workers

#110
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It absolutely is. If the best you can do with someone with an advanced degree is make them drive a car, you're wasting a valuable mind on a menial task.

If it was a valuable mind then surely the owner of it would opt to do a more valuable activity than drive a car around? Google is just providing an option. Should they be binning applications for the position that include degrees?

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