Cruise Ship Blues: The Underside of the Cruise Ship Industry (23 page)

One year earlier a 54-year-old woman who worked at the gift shop on the
Crystal Harmony
initiated a lawsuit against Crystal Cruises, claiming that the company allowed a sexually charged atmosphere and that she had been fired for refusing the captain’s advances. She said that from the start, parties and love affairs were common among crew members.

But more disturbing, she said, was how the ship’s top brass hit on stewardesses and other lower-ranking crewmembers.... One ship stewardess confided ... that she was “stressed” over sleeping with 31 crewmembers.

And she heard that an officer tried to hang himself after finding his girlfriend in bed with the ship’s doctor.. She also said she once encountered the captain and a stewardess in a sex act below deck.
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The woman claims she was forced to engage in sex with the captain, for fear that if she refused she would lose her job. She characterized the cruise ship as a more blatant sexually promiscuous environment than any she had ever seen, and said that “the officers and captain think they can take liberty with anyone.. It’s quite amazing.. Nobody wants to complain, because they would lose their job.”
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Is the problem worse on cruise ships than in other work settings? There is no way of knowing because very few complaints become public knowledge. Victims are often not in a position to do anything to correct the situation. As pointed out in the ICONS report,
Ships, Slaves, and Competition,
“crew members who suffer . sexual assault . are quickly removed from the ship, usually with no compensation, and access to uS courts.”
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This, unfortunately, is part of the reality these women endure to earn a living.

It Isn’t Just Female Employees

It is even more difficult to get a clear picture of sexual exploitation of male employees. Given the double stigma of homophobia and the perceived loss of masculinity, male victims rarely report abuses. However, the ITF recently documented several sexual predators working in supervisory positions on cruise ships. Two of them have a 15-year history.

Like the harassment and abuse of women, the victimization of men involves a person in authority using the employee’s continued employment and/or opportunity for advancement as a means for extracting sexual favors. The blatancy of the perpetrators’ behavior is hard to assess because most victims are unwilling to openly discuss their experiences. At this point, all we know for sure is that such abuse takes place and that it may occur as frequently as the harassment and abuse of women.

$500 for an Interview, $1,000 for the Job

Many laborers and service workers on cruise ships have secured their job through a recruiting agent. Although International Labor Organization (ILO) regulations prohibit agents from collecting fees from the worker — they are supposed to be collected from the employer — workers are often required to pay to secure a position.
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These payments range from $500 to as much as $4,000.
¹⁶

Paul Chapman’s study of international seafarers,
Trouble on Board
, provides insight into the role of the recruiting agent:

In many cases, seafarers view their recruiting agent, not the captain or the ship owner, as their employer. The agent becomes the seafarer’s patron, someone to whom they remain loyal despite abuses. The others in authority are strangers; seafarers often do not know the ship owner, and the officers who give day-to-day orders are often from another country and speak another language. It is the agent with whom the seafarers negotiate the terms of their contract, in whose office employment agreements are signed, and the person who forwards allotment payments to their families.
¹⁷

The cost to the employee is not trivial. A 1997 story in the
Wall Street Journal
cites a Croatian worker who paid $600 to an agent to confirm his employment.
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In addition, he started work with a $1,400 debt to Carnival Cruise Line, which had advanced the cost of his transportation to the ship.

In February 2000 an article in the
Miami New Times
described a cook on Carnival Cruise Line’s
Paradise
who had given a Bombay agency $2,000, an amount which included airfare.
¹⁹
That sum, much of which he had borrowed from relatives, is almost one-third of the $7,000 he would make during his ten-month contract.

In 2001 I was told of an agent in Romania charging $500 to interview for a position with Norwegian Cruise Line. If a person was hired, he or she would be required to pay an additional $1,000 to secure the position. It would take the worker at least two months to recoup this expense.

An obvious question is, why do workers tolerate such situations? Because, simply put, they need the job and they naively believe that the cruise ship will provide career opportunities. Once onboard, they tolerate continued abuses because they know that to speak up would mean losing their job. It isn’t just a matter that they would be sent home, but in many cases they have not yet earned enough to cover the expenses incurred in securing the employment, including return airfare.
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Contrary to ITF-approved standard contracts that require travel expenses to be borne by the employer, it is not uncommon for workers to have to pay for their own transportation and, upon arrival at the ship, to have to deposit an open ticket for their return flight home. upon dismissal, the cruise line simply makes flight arrangements for that ticket.

The harsh reality of going into debt to secure employment is further reflected in how workers deal with job loss. I became aware of this issue when my partner and I were on a cruise in 1994. While we were sitting on the deck waiting to disembark, we were joined by the food and beverage manager, a man we knew through two previous cruises. We asked him how he was. He responded that he had been up all night and proceeded to tell us that he was firing 33 workers. He had spent the night making arrangements for their flights home and was now preparing to let them know that they were headed home that afternoon. He explained that he waited until the last minute to prevent harm to the ship and to prevent the workers from harming themselves.

This last comment appeared self-serving until several years later. In August 1998 I read a newspaper account of the death of a 28-year-old Turkish woman. Upon learning she was going to be fired from her job aboard Holland America Line’s
Westerdam,
she committed suicide by jumping overboard as the ship approached Vancouver harbor.

In many cases, between the debt incurred to get the job and the humiliation of having to return home after being fired, workers see few alternatives. It is hard to know how common suicides are among ship’s crew because this is not regularly reported in the mass media, but more than once, unfortunately, cruise ship workers have told me about employee suicides, and on one occasion I was onboard a ship when one of its employees took his own life.

INCOMES

Like the length of contracts, the wages paid by cruise lines also vary widely. In the ultraluxury category, a waiter working for Seabourn Cruises earns approximately $3,000 a month before tips; in contrast, a waitress with Radisson Seven Seas Cruises earns $2,000 a month before tips. Waiters’ wages on the premium cruise lines also vary. Holland America Line, which has a policy of “tipping not required,” pays its waiters $300 a month. Celebrity Cruises pays its waiters a mere $50 a month and then charges $7 a week for breakage — whether or not anything has been broken. Mass-market cruise lines pay salaries similar to those of Celebrity Cruises. On most cruise ships, service personnel earn the bulk of their income from gratuities; Silversea, Seabourn and Radisson are exceptions.

It is difficult to get reliable figures regarding pay rates. No cruise line releases this information. Much of what I know has been gleaned from workers, from investigative journalists, from investigations done by labor groups, and from testimony presented in congressional hearings.
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See Table 5.1 for an indication of the salaries (including vacation pay) specified in a typical ITF-approved contract for a ship operating solely in Europe and serving a largely Western European clientele. The contract wage is guaranteed in case of illness or where tips are insufficient.