Cruise Ship Blues: The Underside of the Cruise Ship Industry (22 page)

Greek workers. Italian-owned lines, like Sitmar Cruises, had Italian workers. And Norwegian-owned cruise lines, such as Seabourn Cruises, drew almost entirely from Scandinavian countries. The workers often began in low-level positions and worked their way up. Many hotel managers on cruise ships today started in a ship’s galley or as cleaners.

Today workers from nonindustrialized countries in Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean dominate service positions, and there is less opportunity to advance within the system. Increasingly, hotel department managers have been brought onboard with the bulk of their experience in onshore hotels. This subtle difference has a significant effect. The old-style managers had spent their life on a ship; they knew the struggles and challenges of shipboard living. The new-style managers bring shoreside management principles and expect them to work at sea. In most cases, they don’t.

Part of this shift is attributable to the incomes demanded by workers. Because it is cheaper to hire workers from nonindustrialized countries, those who previously worked their way up through the ranks (that is, Western Europeans) are no longer hired for entry-level positions.

Another factor is the length of the employment contract. Workers from industrialized countries are unlikely to accept low pay along with long hours and long contracts with no days off. Cruise lines are unlikely to move to shorter contracts because of the time and expense involved in finding and training more workers. Longer contracts mean fewer workers overall.

Variations by Cruise Line

As well as by nationality, contract length varies from cruise line to cruise line. The main deviation from the norm is among cruise lines in the ultraluxury category —

Silversea, Seabourn, and Radisson Seven Seas. Their standard contracts for officers are the same as on other cruise lines, but contracts for service personnel are comparatively shorter.

On the ultraluxury cruise lines, dining room waiters and room stewards typically work five or six months and then have a two-month vacation. Also, these workers are paid more generous salaries and do not depend on gratuities for the bulk of their income.

How Many Hours Can a Body Work?

Almost everyone employed on a cruise ship works long hours. Although the ITF’s standard contract specifies that workers have at least ten hours off duty within each 24-hour period, this is not always the case. With the minimum required hours of rest, the workweek can hold as many as 98 hours.

Standard ITF-approved contracts stipulate that workers in deck and engine departments be paid for a 40-hour week, plus a guaranteed 103 hours of overtime per month. Contracts for workers in the hotel department often include 160 to 170 hours of overtime per month. The result is a typical workweek of more than 80 hours.

The ten hours of required rest may be broken into no more than two periods, one with at least six consecutive hours off duty and the interval between rest periods not exceeding 14 hours. On a practical level, this means that a person may be required to work 14 hours straight — which means that the person serving you in the dining room or navigating on the bridge may have had a break of only six hours since last finishing a work shift.

A 2001 ITF survey of workers on cruise ships docking at Port Canaveral, Florida, provides some insight into the actual hours worked. Almost one-third of crew members indicated they worked 12 or more consecutive hours without a rest period. One-third reported having no rest period longer than six hours. Thirty-seven percent reported having eight-hour rest periods. Only 25

percent reported having ten hours of uninterrupted rest.

This work pace continues day after day, without a day off, for the duration of the contract. More than 95 percent of workers on cruise ships report working seven days a week, week after week. Several studies document the impact of this pace of work. A major report by the International Commission on Shipping (ICONS), released in March 2001 under the title
Ships, Slaves, and Competition,
cited the problem of worker fatigue as a major factor in accidents onboard ships.
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The US Coast Guard independently estimates that fatigue was a factor in 16 percent of critical ship casualties and in 33 percent of personal injury cases.

The debilitating effect of the pace is also quite real. Many workers have told me that their first month of vacation is spent sleeping — they are so worn out from work that it takes that long to catch up and again feel “human.” The second month is usually spent with family and friends, but much of the time the employees are preoccupied with the dread of having to return to the ship for another 10- to 12-month period without a day off. So why do they do it? Often the incentive is the knowledge that they are providing for their family. Others hope to save enough money to one day start their own business at home.

Race, Ethnicity, and National Origin

Most cruise ships proudly tell passengers the number of nations represented among the staff, presenting this as a positive feature. But such diversity can undermine collective action by crew. People with dissimilar backgrounds are less likely to cooperatively join forces on an issue. In only a few cases have cruise ship workers attempted collective action.

In 1981 240 Central American workers went on strike aboard a Carnival Cruise Lines ship at Miami to protest the firings of two coworkers. The strike ended quickly when Carnival called US Immigration, declared the strikers illegal immigrants, bused them to the airport, and flew them home.
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Similarly, in January 1986 Norwegian Cruise Lines solved a sudden labor dispute aboard the Norway by loading 55 South Korean, Jamaican, and Haitian room stewards onto buses at the Port of Miami and sending them back to their home countries. It’s a story I’ve heard more than once. Paul Chapman paints a similar picture in his book
Trouble on Board: The Plight of International Seafarers:
“On cruise ships, supervisors often tell seafarers who complain, ‘If you don’t like it here, you can go home.’ Since the seafarer has already paid for the return trip, the threat is real and the seafarers know it will be carried out at their expense.”
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The mediating effects of diversity and the threat that staff will lose their job if they complain are effective mechanisms for keeping workers “in their place” and under control. The workers know to do their jobs without complaining. One worker with Carnival Cruise Line had his pay reduced by $80 after five years with the company. Although clearly upset and unsure what had prompted the reduction, he dared not complain: he feared his supervisors would brand him a troublemaker if he did. He said he would rather endure the pay reduction than lose his job.
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Subtle forms of control are exercised in other ways. Holland America Line prides itself on having Indonesian room stewards and dining room waiters. On a cruise aboard the
Veendam,
I asked a busboy who was handing out trays at the Lido buffet (a cafete-ria-style dining room) what it was like working with a surveillance camera trained on him — there is a camera in the ceiling, like those in casinos, monitoring activity in the Lido. His response was dispassionate and simple: “The Dutchman is always watching.” It became clear that the traditional colonial relationship between the Dutch and Indonesians was replicated on these ships. The Indonesian staff was naturally reverent and deferential to the Dutch bosses, not just as their employer but also as the colonial power under which previous generations grew up.

Diversity on ships can also make workers’ lives more difficult. Occasionally fights break out between workers, and there have been stabbings. Likely the most extreme occurrence was a riot in the spring of 1994 when a crew galley ran out of rice. The cook and six others were killed in the riot. This level of violence is uncommon, but tensions between individuals and/or groups are not.

A number of years ago, I heard that an executive chef on Norwegian Cruise Line’s
Norway,
a man I knew from several cruises with different cruise lines, had been fired. He was setting up a midnight Chocoholic buffet when a Filipino safety officer walked by, jabbed him in the ribs, and stated ethnic slurs. This pattern was not new; the chef had endured it for weeks. On this occasion, however, he had had enough. He walked into the galley, returned with a fire extinguisher, and emptied the contents onto the safety officer. While the chef lost his job -retrospectively, something he was glad about — the safety officer was merely reprimanded.

On a recent cruise aboard an ultraluxury ship, I observed a dynamic in the dining room between the dominant Austrian (and other Germanic) staff and employees who were clearly non-Germanic. One waiter, the only Italian, was treated less respectfully by supervisors than his Austrian subordinates. In addition, he was responsible for the pasta trolley — a station that prepared fresh pasta dishes at lunch — with his Italian heritage visibly exploited. The overall dynamics, many of which were subtle, led my partner to one day say to this waiter after dinner, “World War II has been over for more than 50 years, but its remnants are still alive here today.” The difference in social position was even greater for the lone dark-skinned waiter from Turkey.

Some cruise lines are less subtle in their treatment of certain workers. Many years ago on Regency Cruises, I met a Honduran busboy. I asked him how long it would take for him to be promoted to waiter. He responded matter-of-factly that he would never be promoted: his skin was too dark for a waiter. Several years later a wine steward told me he used to work for Crystal Cruises, but one day the Japanese-owned cruise line fired all its Filipino wine stewards. The fired employees, who were told their skin color and nationality didn’t project the company’s desired image, were replaced with people of European descent.

Female Employees and Sexual Exploitation

On cruise ships, as in many work settings, female employees often deal with sexual harassment and sexual exploitation. And, as in other work settings, the problem is kept relatively quiet, in large part because the victims are in a vulnerable position that inhibits their ability to speak up.

In his book
Trouble on Board: The Plight of International Seafarers,
Paul Chapman shares insightful comments from an interview with a cruise ship bar waitress:

Nick, the bar manager, turned out to be nothing but a constant source of trouble. On the second night aboard, he approached Barbara about going to bed with him. She tactfully declined his crude advances — Nick kept up his disgusting pursuit of Barbara. We had a rough time. He

was a disgusting creep who just wouldn’t leave us alone, and he was our boss.

When I left that ship, I finally had a phone conversation with the owner. He only laughed at me and said I was wasting his time.. I was very lucky that I had the money to get myself out of the rotten situation; but there are many who are not as fortunate. They have to stay and make the best of it because they have families to support.. [T]hat is the weakness which . [is exploited.]
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In an article based on her five years at sea, a young woman whose job it was to produce the ship’s daily newspaper tells similar stories. She recounts an officer who refused to take no for an answer and who chased a female crew member so relentlessly that she signed off in tears at a remote port in Alaska.
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The problem of sexual harassment was given considerable media attention in late 1999 following discovery hearings in which Carnival Cruise Line admitted to receiving 108 complaints of sexual assault (including 22 rapes — 16 rapes of passengers by crew and six rapes in which one crew member assaulted another) in a five-year period; Royal Caribbean indicated it had received 58 complaints over the same period.

The discovery was part of a lawsuit brought against Carnival Cruise Line by a woman who had worked as a nurse for three years. She claimed she had been raped and sodomized in August 1998 by the ship’s engineer, allegedly an experienced sexual predator, while working on the
Imagination.
She had immediately reported the incident, and the engineer was promptly fired. However, his firing was not because of the rape, but because he had been drinking within six hours of going on duty and for being tardy. The case was settled 15 months later, less than two weeks before its scheduled trial.
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