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Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years

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301–310 of 426 posts

Re: Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems to me that corporations owning ships having financial difficulties would be a natural consequence of outsourcing behaviour. You want to outsource risk and responsibilities. So the big companies get rid of their ships and hire small companies on the edge of profitability. I assume it's not always the most sound way to do business but some should get away with it.

How? I mean there are shady American transport firms. This isn’t the result of big massive conglomerates. It’s mom and pop small firms. People to small and broke to sue.

mv aman is a 100m ship. any company owning that is kinda stretching the term "mom and pop".

Re: Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years

#302
post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you piss in a bottle on a daily basis as part of your job? Comparing peeing in a bottle [a few times in your life] for expediency compared to doing it on the daily, seems to be its own conflation.

If my current workplace offered me a 15% raise in exchange for forgoing toilet breaks and pissing in a bottle for the next year, I would go for it. I'm sure there's a number for which I'd agree to be stranded on a boat off the coast of Egypt without power, but I suspect it's closer to 15x my salary. As I understand it, this makes the latter 100x worse than the former.

No, you'd need to compare the actual job that requires you to piss in a bottle, along with its salary, not your current job with a 15% bonus tacked on.

Also people don't sign up to be abandoned on a ship, they're not told of that possibility, until it happens. They signed up to be merchant marines or seaman, not prisoners of ghost ships.

Just because you find getting bit by a dog more palatable than falling into a pit of snakes, doesn't make getting bit by a dog okay or acceptable.

Re: Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years

#303
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It happens fairly frequently. The owner runs into financial difficulty and the creditors seize the ship. The crew can't leave because they aren't allowed to abandon it, as well as not having a visa to enter the US to get to the airport, nor the money for airfare home. The locals usually donate food & supplies to the crew. https://www.charlestoncitypaper.com/story/how-a-charleston-p...

I'm slightly confused, if the owner can't afford to deal with the costs, they obviously dont have the financial ability to penalize the individual NOT to abandon ship. That level of cognitive disconnect surely can't be held up as valid in any legal system that has greater cognitive ability to do 'connect the dots drawings'.

That story is probably due to coronavirus travel restrictions, given it is from last May.

Re: Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you call indentured servitude slavery, you're not helping - it just lessens the dynamic range of language. It sure doesn't help actual slaves.

> If you call indentured servitude slavery You’re being perfectly accurate; indentured servitude is consistent with both historical understandings of slavery and modern legal definitions; it was certainly distinct from the particular form of chattel slavery that was popular for a few hundred years and fell out of fashion in thr 19th century, and it is useful to be able to distinguish them since they overlapped in tim…

American abolitionists very much understood that chattel slavery wasn't the only form of slavery. The text of the 13th amendment indicates as much.

Re: Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years

#305

What would happen if the ship "accidentally" started sinking, or if an explosion or other event of some sort happened to damage the ship?

hard to imagine how he could intentionally sink the ship given its lack of fuel/power

> hard to imagine how he could intentionally sink the ship given its lack of fuel/power

Shawshank Redemption style. Eroding the hull from inside and letting rust do the rest.

Re: Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years

#306

Folks - this is what we are outsourcing and externalizing. When foreign entities are able to bid for a lot less, and pay a lot less, a lot of it has to do with the fact that they will not bother with 'end of life' for ships, or getting insurance, or worrying about the lives of people who are 'expendable'. Those very nice buildings in Dubai come from some nasty labour practices. If every piece of this puzzle from end-…

Err here in the United States you have people pissing in bottles and bags because they can't take a break without missing targets. The West is not immune to predatory hiring and employment practices.

Ever been enslaved on a Thai fishing boat? I know a few people who have, including a neighbor that was missing for 3 years. The US has its own problems, but places like Dubai, Southeast Asia, etc. have a much more severe problem with mistreatment and abuse of workers.

Last year a building collapsed here during construction and killed about 60 people. Stuff like that happens all the time.

Re: Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years

#307
post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have pissed in a bottle before out of expediency, but I've never spent several years stranded on a ship without power, company, etc, out of free will. Conflating the two seems weird.

Do you piss in a bottle on a daily basis as part of your job? Comparing peeing in a bottle [a few times in your life] for expediency compared to doing it on the daily, seems to be its own conflation.

Private investigators have to do this routinely. Of course they are probably self-employed.

OSHA laws require companies allow bathroom breaks though.

Re: Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name me a country where logistics orgs never run out of money or resources.

The United Federation of Planets doesn’t even use money, and it’s post-scarcity so they don’t run out of resources.

I had a feeling someone was eventually going to pull this one out. :)

Re: Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, here’s the IMO database entry on the MV Aman. It provides much additional context. https://www.ilo.org/dyn/seafarers/seafarersbrowse.details?p_... In particular, here’s a recent update that sheds some light on why Mr. Aisha remained aboard - in short, he refused to leave unless and until he was paid the wages due to him: Govt. of Bahrain (7 March 2021) From Registration of Ships & Seamen Affairs I would like to h…

This seems like pretty important information if correct. A huge portion of the HN discussion is moot if the Mr. Aisha chose to remain. Seems like he could have continued his fight for the outstanding wages elsewhere.

I thought this video was pretty clarifying, including words from Aisha himself: https://youtu.be/1zD-KjuGuiM

It definitely sounds like he got at the very least a shitty deal. If you don't have time to watch, he mentions he feels he signed something he didn't fully understand, leaving him liable as guardian, passport seized and all.

Re: Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years

#310
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article says the parent company is in financial difficulties, and the individual in question was basically being held for ransom (along with the ship). Depending on the ordering of debts (for the company), they may not have been able to compensate the Egyptians. All of that being said, I agree an American company likely would have had this sorted out faster, because the USA tends to deal with bankruptcies and the…

Seems to me that corporations owning ships having financial difficulties would be a natural consequence of outsourcing behaviour. You want to outsource risk and responsibilities. So the big companies get rid of their ships and hire small companies on the edge of profitability. I assume it's not always the most sound way to do business but some should get away with it.

What’s the option if you don’t outsource? Every company who wants to ship something by sea needs to purchase and boat and man a crew?
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