Stuck at sea for years, a sailor’s plight highlights a surge in shipowner abandonment, AP, 30 May 2024

Abdul Nasser Saleh says he rarely got a good night’s sleep during the near-decade he spent working without pay on a cargo ship abandoned by its owner at ports along the Red Sea.

By night, he tossed and turned in his bunk on the aging Al-Maha, he said, thinking of the unpaid wages he feared he’d never get if he left the ship. By day he paced the deck, stuck for the last two years in the seaport of Jeddah, unable to set foot on land because of Saudi Arabia’s strict immigration laws...

Saleh’s plight is part of a global problem that shows no signs of abating. The United Nations has logged an increasing number of crew members abandoned by shipowners, leaving sailors aboard months and sometimes years without pay. More than 2,000 seafarers on some 150 ships were abandoned last year.

The number of cases is at its highest since the UN’s labor and maritime organizations began tracking abandonments 20 years ago, spiking during the global pandemic and continuing to rise as inflation and logistical bottlenecks increased costs for shipowners...

Yet the nations that register these ships and are required by treaty to assist abandoned seafarers sometimes fail to get involved in the cases at all. Tanzania, which registered the ship where Saleh was abandoned, never acted on his case or even responded to emails, said Mohamed Arrachedi, a union organizer with the International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF) who worked on Saleh’s case...“It’s one of the worst cases I have seen in my 23 years as an ITF inspector,” Arrachedi said...

Shipowners often abandon crew members when they are hit by rising fuel costs, debt or unexpected repairs they can’t afford. Some owners vow to pay when their finances turn around. But those promises can mean little to the men on board, who often resort to handouts for food and basic supplies. Many are also supporting families back home and risk losing everything if they step off their ships.

Crew members or the countries where the ships are registered or docked can pursue the shipowners in court. But recovering past wages can be a years-long battle that often fails...

Under the Maritime Labor Convention, a widely ratified international agreement considered a bill of rights for seafarers, workers at sea are deemed abandoned when shipowners withhold two months of wages, stop supplying adequate food supplies, or fail to pay to send them home.

The convention requires flag states to step in when shipowners abandon crews. They’re responsible for ensuring the seafarers’ welfare, repatriation, and verifying that shipowners have insurance to cover up to four months of wages.

But the rules aren’t uniformly followed, and beyond naming and shaming there are few ways to enforce the standards. Last year, nearly half of abandoned ships had no insurance, according to the IMO. In dozens of cases, flag states that are signatories to the international treaty never even responded when told by the IMO that crews on board their ships were stranded without pay. AP’s review found that countries notified the IMO of their efforts to resolve cases less than a quarter of the time.

The flag states with the most abandoned ships tend to have large ship registries by dint of offering lower fees. Panama has registered 20% of all ships abandoned since 2019, according to AP’s analysis of the U.N. data, followed by Tanzania, Palau, and Togo which each were responsible for about 5%. The four countries are all considered by the ITF to be “flags of convenience” with minimal oversight...

None of the countries responded to AP’s questions about abandonment...

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