Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s slavery
They may have been paying him. (it would still be slavery, however, you have a right to quit your job).
He was unpaid and the Egyptian courts won't let him leave.
Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years
391–400 of 426 posts
Re: Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years
#392It is supremely unfair for the court to assign him full responsibility for the ship, but without any power over it. If the court were serious about the situation they should have handed the ship over to him entirely. He could then put the ship up on the market for whomever wanted to buy it or sell it to a scrapping company. If you think this would be unfair to the ships owners this is exactly the point. Force them to…
Suppose he did sell the ship, without proper authority, wouldn’t that be a civil matter between he and the owners? It was basically derelict, right? It seems like a salvage company could come in, pay any fines to Egypt, fuel the ship a d then drive it away and it would be theirs. That further incentives the owners to handle their business.
It would probably be difficult to find a salvage company willing to take on that much legal risk.
Maybe the guy could have made some calls down to Somalia and convinced some pirates that a big prize was ripe for the taking if they were willing to take a road trip?
Re: Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
The wealthy exploiting the poor predates capitalism by 10s of thousands of years.
> The wealthy exploiting the poor predates capitalism by 10s of thousands of years. I feel like in order to make this claim, you'd need a pretty detailed definition of what "capitalism" is.
Not that Wikipedia is the definitive source of knowledge, but it indicates capitalism forming around the 16th century[1].
Re: Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Normally I don’t engage in these kind of false comparisons and I do know that south east asia has a problem with off shore industrial slavery unprecedented in the USA. Sometimes things are uniquely bad in other parts of the world and there is no domestic comparison. That is certainly the case with the enslaved fishing vessels (although a case can be made about EU/EFTA operated fishing vessels out of Western Sahara an…
That Hard Rock building collapse did not seem to be something that happens all the time in the US. That thing got tons of news coverage because it is rare. It definitely happens, but not on the scale of many of the countries it is being compared to in this thread.
Re: Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
Read a story of a ship's captain, stuck on the ship at anchor in New Jersey. There is a mariner's charity in Greater New York that would help out. They would post a bond with ICE and drive the sailor to an airport or another ship. Well, whether 9/11 security or what, they weren't allowed to do this. So the captain had been on the ship for over a year. So, yes, it can happen here.
Sounds interesting. Got a link?
This was in print and almost 20 years ago, so unfortunately not.
Re: Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article says he wasn't paid, at least part of the time. But what I'm saying is that this whole practice makes no sense. There must be people on shore who would be willing to be custodians of abandoned ships. That's a business idea, start an office offering ship custodians for shipping companies. When they get in trouble they can hire your custodian instead of stranding one of their own employees far from home.
This business wouldn't work out, because you expect to be paid. Stranded employees get stranded because they are seen as expendables, ones that don't need to be paid.
Yeah sure it wouldn't work without a global change in policy too. Because right now shipping companies are just leaving their ships because of hardships, so to think they'd hire someone is silly.
But with policy changes one can imagine a future where sailors prefer employers who have a contract with ship custodians before signing up with them, thereby voting with their employment.
Re: Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, ask Amazon workers about that.
The warehouse workers down in Alabama? Why would you ask them? They didn't want one. It wasn't close at all, either.
Because Amazon moving killed all other local work opportunities, and also because Amazon did not allow workers access to union organizers and information. The case is probably going to go the NRLB which will rule the election illegal.
Re: Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
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'.
I would imagine it is illegal to abandon a ship in port
Illegal for whom? Surely it's illegal for the owner, or perhaps the captain at most, but not the crew?
Re: Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years
#399Earlier 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.
Name me a country where logistics orgs never run out of money or resources.
Let's invert that.
Let's assume that logistics organisations consistently run out of resources. That this is a probabalistic outcome of operations. The BBC article even gives us a sense of the baseline risk, about 250 cases presently, and 85 new ones reported in 2020 (meaning that typical durations exceed a year in length).
In that case, how do you address the inevitable circumstance without creating a human rights abuse crisis, presuming sufficient consideration and political will exists for this to occur?
Elsewhere in the thread, surity bonds are mentioned. That is, a ship on entering a port or other navigational / marine facility, places a bond in which some large and far more solvent entity assures that compensation where due is paid.
International treaties (to which major transit points such as canals might be obligated to join) are another option.
An international response organisation with the ability to both intervene and impose additional sanctions on any entities which impose such sailor-arrest.
Keep in mind that the 2020 Beruit ANFO explosion occurred after a not-dissimilar situation, in which a ship was deemed unseaworthy and its cargo seized and held under exceptionally (and ultimately massively fatal and damaging) conditions, in part because its ownership and questions over compensation were not met.
(There were quite admittedly other concerns and failures, including by the Beruit port authority and judiciary, but the ownership and payment aspects touched on most of these. Hazardous cargo and storage have been at the heart of several other recent major disasters, including in Tianjin, China.)
Whilst "flag of convenience" regulations make race-to-the-bottom standards in shipping regulation common, obligations to maintain surity bonds or similar instruments of substantial duration (e.g., a year or more) to access major ports, canals, fueling depots, and the like, could help ensure compliance.
Re: Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years
#400Earlier 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.
I piss in bottles and on the sides of roads on road trips. Sometimes daily, depending on the length of the trip. You make it sound like some great injustice. It's just pissing in a bottle, who cares? It's pretty offensive to compare this to being held prisoner on a ship.
Doing something freely of choice with no (or very mimial) downside risk, and doing it at the penalty of losing ones jobs, whilst the employer denies the practice, have substantial daylight between them.