1990s, competition to ensure a constant and reliable supply of low wage labour has
encompassed nearly the entire globe: Filipinos, Eastern Europeans, and Chinese ratings
are joined by officers from countries such of the United Kingdom, Greece, Norway,
Denmark, and India. According to a representative of the International Ship Managers’
Association, “You go to a place, you harvest, then you abandon that place and go to the
next one.”
The net effect is that “the hunt [for low wage labour] is a tale of human
arbitrage in an industry driven by globalization.”
Thus, transnational capital searches
the world for the highest return on its investment in the seafaring labour force.
Labour sending states, to be sure, are complicit in furthering labour flexibilization
processes on the open seas. At the beginning of the 21
st
century, over 80% of the world’s
seafarers come from Asian and Eastern European countries.
The Republic of the
Philippines notably is considered the “crewing capital” of the world, dominating the
labour supply for junior officers and ratings.
In the early 1980s, there were roughly
50,000 Philippine nationals working as seafarers outside the country. The numbers
increased exponentially during the late 1980s and early 1990s. By the early 21
st
century,
over 200,000 seafarers left their country annually for work on board cargo and passenger
ships.
This exponential increase came at a time in which the Philippine state officially
entered the transnational migrant labour market by incorporating the “export” of
Philippine labour as a key strategy of development to mitigate the pressures of
unemployment and underemployment exacerbated further by economic restructuring
policies under the tutelage of the IMF and the World Bank.
So important are seafarer remittances to the country’s economy that the state
requires foreign employers to remit 80% of seafarers’ monthly salaries or “allotments”
directly to Philippine crewing agencies that then are responsible for disbursing the
remittances to seafarer families (some crewing agencies are known to delay
disbursements of allotments to seafarer families in order to take advantage of fluctuations
in the currency exchange rates).
The Seafarer One Stop Processing Center was setup to
facilitate the processing of passports, seamen’s booklets (record of ship job sites and
performance), exit permits and so forth.
The state-run Philippine Overseas Employment Agency (POEA) is responsible
for implementing policies covering “overseas contract workers”: key amongst its tasks is
to negotiate standardized work contracts for landed and ocean-based workers. In the past
few years, revisions to the POEA standardized employment contract for seafarers reveal
the privileging of seafarers’ successful placement and completion of their work contract
over labour rights per se. Seafarers are expected to comply with “company policy” that
may not be vetted by POEA or labour representatives. They can be dismissed for
“creating trouble outside the vessel’s premises” or for “any activity which tends to
destroy the harmonious relationship of the company.
The contract also prohibits
seafarers from negotiating higher wages with employers once they have agreed to the
conditions of the contract by signing it.
Shipowners’ attempts to reduce coverage for
sick or injured crew members’ medical and living expenses are facilitated by the POEA
as its contract restricts compensation to direct “work-related” incidences. This move
undermines seafarers’ long established right commonly known as “maintenance and
cure,” in that ship owners are expected to pay for seafarers’ medical care and living
expenses until they have fully recovered or reached “maximum cure.” In lieu of interstate
competition to place their citizen seafarers on ships all over the world, the Philippine
state has delayed adoption of ILO mandated increases in the minimum monthly wages of
5
Convention