I paid money to cross the Pacific Ocean on a Maersk line, 300 meter cargo ship (us_en here). Many people asked me if I worked to be on board, and the answer was "no", Maersk did not allow it. The officers were mostly East Germans who needed a job, while the strictly segregated, "A-Bs" were almost all Pacific Islanders of some kind. The conditions were clean and professional, but I got the feeling soon that this was not a desirable job. The officers would spend at least 60 days on duty, often more.. without a vacation day, but had a weekly day "off" or two, except the Captain who is technically working at all times.
I enjoyed the travel and had a good voyage, with many small things to say about it at another time. As I learn about "business" and the world, I understand more about labor abuses, even with "respectable" companies. And, your outrage does nothing, because people who mistreat others professionally are quite used to the complaining, including yours. I am not at all surprised at this article.
Lowest is Ordinary Seaman (OS). This is the entry level rating in the deck department. The only qualifications required are basic safety and firefighting training. The corresponding entry level rating in the engine department is Wiper.
And, your outrage does nothing, because people who mistreat others professionally are quite used to the complaining, including yours. I am not at all surprised at this article.
I enjoyed your post until this sentence. The article describes a situation gradually deteriorating into a crisis. The barrier between people complaining and things actually happening are indeed high but I still believe taking note of a crisis is a first step to acting.
> taking note of a crisis is a first step to acting.
Yes, in the same way overcoming denial is the first step in personal recovery. The trouble is, like a depressed alcoholic who doesn't care that drink's ruining their life, it's not that those running the company are in denial about the way they're abusing their employees. It's that they know it and don't care.
What's the path from here to them caring, though? One thing that might help is if their clients stopped doing business with them, but do their clients care?
The shipping company’s clients will stop doing business with them if the shipping company cared, by switching to their competitors who do not care and will sell to them at lower prices.
The only solutions are political, with some combination of giving those people being subject to abuse better options so that the abusers are not able to abuse, and by making said abuses illegal.
Suppose Denmark/the EU passes laws that require Maersk to operate ethically. Maersk and all other Danish shipping companies now need to charge their customers more, so won't what you said in the first line just happen at the international level, with clients switching to, say, a Chinese shipping company?
Possibly, but Denmark/EU could also require proof of meeting certain labor standards in order for ships to dock. Many times, the political problem is getting global adherence. See pollution and emissions.
Why? The problem with complaining (such as in an echo chamber like HN often is too) is that it is a way to vent frustration, taking the pressure of an issue. So in a way complaining actually helps the ones you are complaining about.
That's an unlikely counterfactual. Most likely if you don't complain, fewer people are aware it's even a problem and the company would just assume no one cares.
It's quite easy to produce a counterexample to your claim. Harvey Weinstein immediately comes to mind. It was complaining that drew attention to his abuses and ultimately led to his conviction.
Women equality, #MeToo, sexual consent issues are all pretty much at the forefront of today's cultural issues. Harvey was an open and shut case, but don't forget the Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh, or Andrew Cuomo, Louis CK, etc. (Some weather the accusation (s) some don't.)
i particularly liked that part, because too often it seems people conflate posting for meaningful action, to the point that posting is a hinderence to meaningful action.
this is also common on cruise ships and naval around the world. - officers are european, with more lately east european.
Then the staff or A-B are usually filipino, Vietmanese or Indonesian. Its more salary then back where they're from - and it has interesting cultural changes in their socities.
In the philippines, these are called "OFW" families. daddy is never home, but because he works "abroad" his family can have newer stuff, be in a better neighborhood, etc.
> this is also common on cruise ships and naval around the world. - officers are european, with more lately east european.
> Then the staff or A-B are usually filipino, Vietmanese or Indonesian.
Merchant marine, sure, but naval? Wouldn’t both officers and crew be the nationality of the force in the vast majority of cases?
Directly, it usually it leads to poor working conditions when you have non-residential workers, especially ones in a quasi-legal status.
For factories, you sometimes have the problem of the factory shutting down after the locals become dependent on it.
For migrant working, it's hard on the children of the family and it causes tension between the families not participating.
Philosophically, one could argue it's exploitation and is very close to slavery except the small amount of pay. Until this type of work is extinct I don't think one can morally campaign for UBI can you?
Currently this type of work is apparently necessary so we've accepted that the system cannot either pay the more wealthy citizen's wage nor up the wage of the foreign workers.
Is there a demand to up the wage of these non-represented workers that make far below minimum wage?
Is there a demand to up the wage of minimal wage for citizens and are the foreign workers mentioned?
Is there a demand for UBI for citizens to not work at all while foreign workers pick up the slack?
UBI is income redistribution. It will always be immoral for those paying to support others who are not working.
What you describe is not exploitation, people are working of their own will and that's the best deal they can have.
When you'll eliminate those jobs with income redistribution and minimum wage those people (especially if they're coming in from a different, poorer country) will just be out of a job.
Our government has bailed out banks multiple times, injected money into the stock market, the airlines, a constant state of war that has lasted since Bush one that has cost trillions of dollars... but UBI that can have its cost reduced by drawing its budget from social security, disability and welfare, that's the one that makes your blood boil?
Some of it is whataboutism, sure. A direct line can be drawn to bank bailouts, airline bailouts, no bid government contracts, military spending and UBI. Our government has decided to supplement the income of some and not others and expected something in return. UBI can be viewed in the same light. You can deduct that much from social security, welfare and government college programs. Those are easy ones, right there. Now it gets more difficult, but that's no small amount - and I'm only talking about the proposed 12K per year UBI. You seem to be under the assumption that people are just going to kick back and retire in Cabo on this, for some reason. You can cut some treatment subsidy programs, because at that point, if a junkie wants to get clean that's where that money should go. Prisoner's payouts get cut, and in America that's not a small amount.
This is a 5 minute budget analysis and not even a real thought process, but people get so emotional about these things that all rational thought goes by the wayside of any benefits that might occur. People might not have so much worry about job insecurity of being one bill away from homelessness. Higher education would be more attainable for so many people. A single income family might be able to take care of a child while one of the parents focused on educating and helping the child become a decent member of society.
If you don't want to help fix the present and the future then you shouldn't complain about it. If you're fine with the direction everything is going, then that's great.
One thing that I've always been curious about with UBI is why not aim to self-sufficiency?
In that, say the US pays UBI, which people use to purchase basic goods, which come from non-US manufacturers.
(and I realize this next flies in the face of 200 years of economic theory)
... But if UBI is a bridge to a post-scarcity society, then shouldn't the emphasis be on post-scarcity? Not just redirecting funds? Which is to say, funding highly automated manufacturing of basic, non-customized, functional good to zero?
You'll never get the prices of food, warmth and shelter down to zero, even if these commodities are no longer scarce.
The present system requires you to have active hands in the creation of these commodities or you don't get a share. In the face of increasing efficiencies, offshoring, etc. people's offer of labor may not find a buyer, making them unemployable. That's where UBI comes in, to assure that post-scarcity is enjoyed by all, not just those that have marketable labor.
Where this gets complicated is the moralizing. But it's not the moral thing to let your neighbor starve when you've got surplus food, even if there's some game theory that you will generate free riders, or some of these people aren't "deserving", or working folks divert a little bit more of the fruits of their labor than they already do, or other societies that are a race to the bottom of human welfare will out-compete us.
It would be immoral to redistribute the real property someone worked on.
I have no issue with income distribution of a social value store since allowing it to be monopolized to prop up the value of a minority rich, to let millions starve, or die of preventable disease is immoral and violent.
I don’t believe Elon Musk is worth billions. I just can’t take his real stuff.
Letting our social value store be co-opted by a handful of memes isn’t exactly free agency, speech, or market of ideas. When “get job, buy stuff” is the one true sentence, why believe ideas like freedom matter?
Money is an abstract distributed ledger conceived of from our old way of imprinting quantity on clay tablets, to track trade.
We’re lead around by gossip, fads, trends… memes… where to look for the best paying jobs, sales… by restricting acceptable discourse around not the literal solution to problems, but the expectations we solve them for corporations to own, and leverage for profit with “fair apportionment” dictated by Byzantine economic math not even the experts can penetrate (there was just a story on HN about how no one knows who owns what in any clear way; it’s all ad hoc to fit a narrative; Google Varoufakis)
We’re told that’s just how it goes and it’s all correct and politically policed for correctness. Yet last year we saw in the news they just hand out hundreds of millions to those in the political network and make everyone else work for them in return.
Relative network effects are the reality of physics and it makes a good concept for understanding society. Adam Smith called for equality of condition to prevent gross inequality and extreme division of labor making for humans dumber than any animal (paraphrasing).
Bring on the universal healthcare, and economics that protect the biological well-being of all people first and force austerity on a minority in the form of an aristocracy
I'm not sure exactly which ideas the other commenter was referring to, but of course currency is affected by memes. Currency is a meme: it only has value due to the widespread idea that it should have value.
> Currency is a meme: it only has value due to the widespread idea that it should have value.
It would be nice if people spent just a tiny amount of time studying economics before pronouncing on it.
A US dollar, for example, is backed by the "full faith and credit of the United States Government", and this has an objectively measurable value (because there are pairs of almost identical securities where one has "full faith and credit" and the other doesn't).
Unless your argument is "all securities and currencies are imaginary," of course, which has no practical value.
Please note that I'm a far-left socialist and I consider capitalism destructive to the planet. But that doesn't mean I don't believe in economics.
Economics are real, but the flow of currency is not economics. The flow of currency is politically influenced and has nothing to do with human trade for humans sake (economics as commonly understood but not actually since it’s conflated with currency movement).
What we should realize through the study of economics is just how screwed things are. Anyone with any math sense should see inflation deflates buying power for the public, and has nothing to do with real trade but belief that a billionaire is leveraging real property so well on his own… oh wait all of humanity serves him by not changing the rules to serve themselves. What a convenient self fulfilling prophecy.
The math makes it obvious which people are winning and science makes it obvious no one is more than one of seven billion. Somehow it’s miraculously a specific few winning big.
Stop listening to it all. People trade. That’s it. There’s no need to speculate and manage the behavior to send billionaires in space on empty promises of humans …magically… becoming the first space faring civ. Sure seems to give Bezos a helluva life. I’m crazy though; humanity has never succumbed to shared fallacy at scale before.
Who knows, maybe healthcare and education for all actually empower the kid who goes on to engineer the next big leap, but contemporary political memes filter those break throughs out by miserly tracking currency debts.
It's not a matter of supporting hiring people of different nationalities. It's supporting the current conditions surrounding these employees. If these workers are not of a legal status, then they are easily abused (working conditions/below minimum pay/etc). These workers are more fearful of being deported than the abuse which means they do not report any of the wrongs that may be occurring. To me, this says much more about the employer.
I’m 100% against having a ruling upper class and hard labor lower class, especially one determined by nationality. It’s disgusting and something we left behind in the 19th century until international capitalism reinvented it.
It's a trendy thing to say these days, but history shows that outrage and public opinion do quite a lot, and that is why people work very hard to manage it (including, these days, to try to appear unbothered). There are plenty of labor laws that the public has passed, and you can see, for example, SV companies responses to publicized labor abuses in their supply chains.
What about the effects of #Metoo, racial injustice protests, LGTBQ+ marriage, transgender protections (and discrimination - outrage results in bad laws too), gun rights outrage, voter ID laws, etc etc etc.
Lots is happening.
Also, outrage doesn't need laws to be effective: Plenty of corporations do things that aren't legally required, in order to please the public. The NFL didn't have to address racial injustice, but it did. Bad things happen too - lynchings, for example.
I didn't say the changes are positive, just that public opinion or outrage causes changes.
Voting rights certainly have advanced many times, including suffrage, voting rights for African-Americans in the 1960s, and smaller advances like motor-voter and mail-in ballots since then. The last few years have been awful, though.
I would argue, that this is actually the goal of todays outrage culture- not to change things for the better within the legal framework of a democracy, but to keep the emotional core of a "movement" going.
> I would argue, that this is actually the goal of todays outrage culture- not to change things for the better within the legal framework of a democracy, but to keep the emotional core of a "movement" going.
I agree about the priority: It's a reactionary, ideological culture/movement; they need to be against something; members need to demonstrate their ideological adherence by being more and more extreme. Passing outrageous laws can be part of that. Passing constructive laws by bringing people to the table, listening to their needs, and creating consensus would indeed undermine the movement, IMHO.
Yeah, that's why so many ships are registered to specific countries too, so they can operate with looser restrictions. It's basically "offshoring" but for the regulations. When I worked in fisheries, I remember seeing so many boats registered to Panama, and never knew why:
http://www.pmacertification.com/advantages-of-registering-a-...
> The officers would spend at least 60 days on duty, often more.. without a vacation day
Note that after X weeks on this schedule, the officers commonly get X weeks off at home as well. (Source: my brother is one.) The ABs though are a different story…
Last time I googled this I found it was quite expensive, basically cruise-level per-night prices, at least in my area. Perhaps if you contact the shipping companies directly you can arrange something cheaper.
I could see them considering a risk factor into that pricing. What "normal" person would look to travel this way? Someone with something to hide perhaps? Someone hoping to skirt some of the more rigorous screening of other travel options, specifically regarding their "luggage"?
I've never done this, but if you read stories by people who have, they appreciate not having 3,000 other tourists on the boat; just a few dozen or so, plus the crew members who don't talk to you.
OP here - there were zero other passengers, and it was exactly the way you say.. the crew did not talk to me.. It was great! many long hours of ocean, days, nights, out in the far blue.. with no computers at all. When I arrived in Japan I was so rested! the passage into Tokyo Bay was so memorable! it takes time.. it was an antidote and clarity..
I have read that too. It seems bizarre that it would be expensive, but there may be a supply an demand issue for the number of people who cannot or will take flight vs. the very limited number of transatlantic and transpacific ship crossings.
Think about it. A ship needs to include essentially a small apartment (with the weight of a small apartment) for a couple weeks (plus food, heat/cooling, electricity, water/sewer, upkeep for the small apartment) whereas for an airplane you just needs to do that for a chair for a few hours. A cruise ship (yes, I know, includes a bunch of luxury amenities, but still the right order of magnitude) has like 30,000 kg per passenger whereas an airplane weighs about 300 kg per passenger.
So whereas ships are more efficient per ton than airplanes, but the end result is that jet air travel is about 5-10 times as efficient per passenger-mile because it's just a chair instead of an apartment. Plus the capital utilization (renting an aluminum chair for a few hours vs a small steel apartment for a few days) aspect.
It is not their core-business like cruises or ferry companies. So there is probably very substantial overhead in coordination, billing and so on. Same goes for anything from any company, technically they can provide service and even might do, but price it is sensible due to extra work is high.
I assume it used to be far more informal and sort of a handshake deal you'd make with the captain, and then the companies formalized it but it was still cheap because no one knew/wanted to do it, but then as the possibility becomes common knowledge, there are way more people who want to do it than there are spots for, so they raise the price.
I did an Atlantic crossing on CMA CGM and it was similar. The officers were almost 100% French and everyone else on board (officers and crew) was Filipino. The longest-serving seaman had been on the ship for 18 months, but typical tours are in 6 month blocks.
The most interesting observation I had was that although there was an "officer's rec room" and a "crew's rec room", it ended up being a "French rec room" and a "Filipino rec room". The long tours don't particularly bother me, I think that's somewhat expected with maritime work.
Every time I meet East Germans, the discussion will inevitably touch the unification and the social tension.
What I heard were complaints on
* privatization by the West and sometimes closure of enterprises. People of age 40 and older remember well the tough years after unification when their parents had no job and had to take a lower-level one.
* they claim that management of states and enterprises was taken over by the Wessies
* a lot of complaints about amerikanization of the culture and aligning with the US in every international policy question under Merkel. I regret I did not ask further about the culture, but just an example: by default radio stations in Germany put American music, more than stations in other Western European countries that I heard. It's very hard to stumble upon songs in German, just as any other language but English. (If you listen to French stations, foreign non-English music is much more probable to hear.)
* East Germans are more atomized and secular. That's similar to other East European contries.
* Women were forced to emansipate in the East, because they needed to work, whereas in the West they could afford being housewifes. And a surprising consequence, in the West a man can't be friends with a married woman -- Ossies living in the West complained of that too.
That's what I've heard from them and some my own superficial impressions from radio. I can't confirm that, but sure it's more or less founded info.
>in the West a man can't be friends with a married woman
Nah, that's no longer true as of today. It used to be like that in the 60+ generation, but among younger people, it really depends on the partners involved.
The German reunification should be a lesson for people who believe it's easy to change a country and its economy.
I remember when the reunification started I firmly believed that the East would quickly get up to speed once the Western system was applied there. It should be easy and the Easterners would be happy. Turns out that progress was slow despite enormous investments and the Easterners didn't really appreciate that the West completely ignored things that Easterners actually liked (their "achievements" = "Errungenschaften" was a big word).
When you consider how difficult the process was/is despite East and West Germany being very close culturally it becomes clear that things like "fixing" and "democratizing" countries like Afghanistan and Iraq are pretty hopeless endeavors. I don't think as Westerner you can even remotely understand the culture and the fact that maybe the people there don't want Western culture.
East Germans are a lot poorer, the East German economy is a lot lower productivity and investment, and politically the old DDR states lean a bit more right (ripe area for AfD recruitment).
Some West germans still look down on Ossies, even though Merkel was one herself. It's a lot like how northern states look down on southern states in the U.S.
Interestingly enough, the east is the most prolific voting area for both far right and the left. Both AfD and Die Linke had their best results in the eastern states.
Might be connected to the horseshoe theory, I'm thinking. Where voters don't have a specific connection to any one political mindset so they choose the party that is the most extreme in their mind and won't hesitate to switch to another more extreme party, even if they switch from far left to far right because they aren't affiliated with a specific political mindset.
On the way between Hamburg and Berlin, there's an area that looks like a deserted warzone. It's where all the young people came from that moved to big cities for the better job opportunities. The people that remain are elderly / unemployed, so naturally those villages will decay. The east had quite some areas that relied on local industry and/or farming for people's income. During the unification, most industry was auctioned off to westerners, so the east took a pretty big hit, both in terms of losing company tax revenue and in terms of losing high-skilled labor.
Here's a good image detailing the wage differences between East-West. Similar charts can be found for GDP, quality of life, and other assorted economic measures. As well as many cultural differentiators like religion. The wall fell decades ago, but the impacts remain, therefore sometimes it makes sense to distinguish between the two.
You probably want to include the context for the graphic.
"Average Wage in Germany by County
Notes: Average daily wages obtained from a 50% random sample of establishments via the Establishment History Panel (BHP) of the Institute for Employment Research (IAB). Real wages are expressed in 2007 euros valued in Bonn, the former capital of West Germany, using county-specific prices. East–West border is drawn for clarification; there is no border today."
Ignoring Merkel and the former President Gauck, the percentage of Ossis in prestigious, affluent or influential positions is very subpar. Enterpreneurs, CEOs, well-known artists, professors, generals, judges ... are disproportionally Wessis, and immigrated Wessis dominate in those positions even in former GDR.
IIRC the discrepancy between population share and elite share for Ossis is even worse than for American blacks.
That special photo is really old by now. Today, you have to know where the wall was to know. Berlin has switched to LED-lighting for all new street lights.
> I assumed they were talking about an event pre-1989.
Same at first, but then having spent time in the South years ago I also realized the prejudice from the North on the South for economic reasons.
The South is typically seen as the most affluent of all of Germany and depending on the Stat the most influenced by politics: as in the case with Baden-Wuttenburg and the Green Party. Hell, people from the Schwabish part (Stutgart) are used looked down on by the rest of Baden-Wuttenburg for being typically very stingy and aloof (even by German standards) and seen as not worth building ties with. I had a bad experience with them, after being warmly welcomed in Germany, but I took that more a random situation rather than anything worth looking deeper into.
It's frankly a very odd situation and makes you wonder why they're even united at all, I spent time in the North near Cologne this summer and to be honest the amount of Turkish people was a very welcomed sight especially how well integrated they were in Society.
I wish I could have remained with that feeling because stuff like this makes me realize how deeply scarred the German psyche is in regards to this topic.
I'm not OP, but I've looked it up before, and it's actually quite expensive. Ballpark of around $75/night (USD). And, of course, it's slow, so you'll be using a substantial portion of your banked vacation time to do it (if that's a concern for you).
I took a container cruise in 2019 (with this guy [0], do recommend although it's probably not possible in a post-COVID world), and prices for all trans-Atlantic routes I could find were between 150-250 EUR/night. My ship arrived at the starting port 3 days late and at the destination port 1 day late, but the rate was not adjusted. The sole other passenger with me had his destination port canceled, but the company dropped him at a different port and purchased him fare the remaining way on a bus.
I think OP paid to travel as a passenger. They explicitly didn't get the option to work on the ship for a discount on their passage. Apparently you can just pay to travel on these container ship lines, although it can take more than 2 weeks to cross the ocean and accommodations vary.
I think ships are a bit like the wild west... one of the last “anything goes” jurisdictions. The cruise industry especially goes to great lengths to avoid regulatory oversight at all costs.
Maersk's insurer, or more likely, legal team wouldn't permit something like this because of the liability they'd carry for enabling it. It wouldn't get past that point to a discussion of region-specific employment restrictions, not that they matter here per your comment.
All they (and every other bigco) care about is doing whatever token "due diligence" they need to do. If your papers aren't legit they don't care as long as they don't know.
I enjoyed the travel and had a good voyage, with many small things to say about it at another time. As I learn about "business" and the world, I understand more about labor abuses, even with "respectable" companies. And, your outrage does nothing, because people who mistreat others professionally are quite used to the complaining, including yours. I am not at all surprised at this article.