Folks - this is what we are outsourcing and externalizing.
When foreign entities are able to bid for a lot less, and pay a lot less, a lot of it has to do with the fact that they will not bother with 'end of life' for ships, or getting insurance, or worrying about the lives of people who are 'expendable'.
Those very nice buildings in Dubai come from some nasty labour practices.
If every piece of this puzzle from end-to-end were to have happened in a 'rich country' there'd be legal issues, PR/media, litigation, and a separate kind of bureaucracy altogether, meaning the 'alternative' for a lot of corporations is just 'wash their hands' of it, pay 1/2 the price, and get all the ugly parts 'off the books'.
We are to the point now where we have ample material surplus - we don't need any more 'plastic stuff from China' - it'd be worthwhile to start integrating a lot of 'off the books' stuff into trade deals. Ironically, it would be good for 'them' as well, because in chaotic, quasi-lawless systems it doesn't make sense for participants to invest in anything further ahead than what is in front of their noses (i.e. don't hate the Lebanese shippers for doing the only thing they can do to remain profitable, i.e. don't hate the player, hate the game) ... forcing some degree of transparency and accountability in these systems might raise prices a little bit, but the benefits would likely be immensely positive in the system overall.
It's nice that the story is made personal, about a real individual (think: that Tom Hanks film about someone stuck in international airport limbo) but that's not really the story here is it.
The fault here is ultimately with egypt. They were not letting him leave, they took his passport and not even letting him get 'deported' back to his home country.
This is not from outsourcing, this is Kafkaesque bureaucracy created by Egypt itself.
Egypt definitely has fault here, but the company that owns the ship could have gotten the ship out of there if they cared about him at all. Yes, it might have been expensive, but I would expect a US based company to have rescued him within weeks of this situation starting, not years.
The article says the parent company is in financial difficulties, and the individual in question was basically being held for ransom (along with the ship). Depending on the ordering of debts (for the company), they may not have been able to compensate the Egyptians.
All of that being said, I agree an American company likely would have had this sorted out faster, because the USA tends to deal with bankruptcies and the like very quickly.
Seems to me that corporations owning ships having financial difficulties would be a natural consequence of outsourcing behaviour. You want to outsource risk and responsibilities. So the big companies get rid of their ships and hire small companies on the edge of profitability.
I assume it's not always the most sound way to do business but some should get away with it.
Let's assume that logistics organisations consistently run out of resources. That this is a probabalistic outcome of operations. The BBC article even gives us a sense of the baseline risk, about 250 cases presently, and 85 new ones reported in 2020 (meaning that typical durations exceed a year in length).
In that case, how do you address the inevitable circumstance without creating a human rights abuse crisis, presuming sufficient consideration and political will exists for this to occur?
Elsewhere in the thread, surity bonds are mentioned. That is, a ship on entering a port or other navigational / marine facility, places a bond in which some large and far more solvent entity assures that compensation where due is paid.
International treaties (to which major transit points such as canals might be obligated to join) are another option.
An international response organisation with the ability to both intervene and impose additional sanctions on any entities which impose such sailor-arrest.
Keep in mind that the 2020 Beruit ANFO explosion occurred after a not-dissimilar situation, in which a ship was deemed unseaworthy and its cargo seized and held under exceptionally (and ultimately massively fatal and damaging) conditions, in part because its ownership and questions over compensation were not met.
(There were quite admittedly other concerns and failures, including by the Beruit port authority and judiciary, but the ownership and payment aspects touched on most of these. Hazardous cargo and storage have been at the heart of several other recent major disasters, including in Tianjin, China.)
Whilst "flag of convenience" regulations make race-to-the-bottom standards in shipping regulation common, obligations to maintain surity bonds or similar instruments of substantial duration (e.g., a year or more) to access major ports, canals, fueling depots, and the like, could help ensure compliance.
> The United Federation of Planets doesn’t even use money
Well, they occasionally say they don’t (and Roddenberry said they don’t), but they actually do (or discussing the fact that they do) in every single one of the series, and several of the movies.
> and it’s post-scarcity so they don’t run out of resources.
They do run into resource limits.
Also, the UFP is, you known, fiction, and not even haed science fiction (or even particularly internally consistent fiction.)
Ships, planets, space, etc. are scarce and owned by various actors. The Federation is an interplanetary government made of sovereign member states, many of which do trade and use money. Even without the use of trade, there must be systems for determining who controls what.
Most of these ships are owned by single vessel companies, much like power plants. This allows the massive shipping companies to walk away from individual vessels.
This legal fiction is only true as long as it is allowed to be. Egypt can see who was operating and using the ship and block their other ships until they fix the issue - they don't need to hold a scapegoat hostage for years.
There is also back channeling. I also believe that if the shipping company and the sailor were from a different country (not necessarily the US but not failed states either), he would have gone home a long time ago.
No, the ship owner abandoned their ship and Egypt wants the trashing to be paid. That's not their fault. The methods to get there are not ideal but given the matroshka method of hiding responsibility I don't see what else they could have done.
The canal was blocked for 6 days and revenue is $15 million per day, so that's $90 million. But many of the ships that were held up eventually transited anyway, so $90 million is an absolute upper bound. Then there is the cost of the operation to free the ship, which I don't know. But Egypt is asking for $1 billion, so the rescue operation would have had to cost at minimum $900 million for the price to be justified. And I know it didn't cost $900 million, because if split evenly over 6 days that would be $150 million per day, which would be > 50% of Egypt's entire government spending over the time period. So I can say with confidence that the rescue was at least an order of magnitude less than that, so another $90 million (and that's still a massive over estimate).
So absolute upper bound for losses is $180 million. If I were making odds I would guess that only 1/3 of the ships diverted around Africa, so $30 million, and that the rescue cost another $15 million, so over/under $45 million.
And that's without even bringing up that there was a canal pilot on the ship at the time who may share some portion of the responsibility for the accident. So, yeah, it's extortion.
I don't know the rules of the canal, but I highly doubt this scenario. The Egyptian gov't basically has a monopoly and can charge anything they want and write any rules they want. Of course, ships are free to circumvent Africa (around the Cape of Good Hope) if they disagree.
More likely: Ships are required by rules to have an Egyptian pilot on-board during the passage, and there is limited legal liability for ordinary operating circumstances. That said, if an Egyptian pilot was found grossly negligent of their duties, then they would be liable. However, in most legal systems, this is an exceptionally high bar. And, I assume if you pass the canal, you subject yourself to the Egyptian court system. (Read about the big cruise ship that ran aground in Italy. That story reads like text book gross negligence!)
Per the Suez Canal Authority - Rules of Navigation Article 4, section 7 (page 7):
“(7) Owners, mobilizers, charterers and/or operators bind themselves responsible for any mistakes resulting from pilot’s advice or arrise by SCA personnel.”
Egypt is using the violation of human rights as extortion here. I’m sorry, I’m this is in no way the fault of the shippers. A fair discussion is two entities sitting at the table and negotiating. Not two sitting at the table with one being cruel to the other that the other might care about. That’s pure extortion.
If a ship were straight-up captured by pirates and the crew held for ransom, I would still expect the company that sent the crew out to do everything in its power to bring them home. If said company simply shrugged and said "we tried to come up with the ransom money, but couldn't", I would consider that behavior unethical.
The same applies here: yes, Egypt is corrupt. Yes, this is a massive violation of human rights. But the company took on a moral responsibility when it sent out that crew. We can't excuse someone from their ethical duty simply because other people neglect theirs. Ethics is meaningless if it stops applying as soon as there's corruption outside.
There’s a time honored solution for this - bond. You’re not allowed in port until you post a bond that would cover whatever - crew repatriation, port fees, whatever. This could be formalized, eg through a holding company (Lloyds?) that the port could verify the bond with, etc. I don’t have any knowledge of the shipping industry but from hearing this and other stories it sounds like a cluster f*k.
They didn't have money they were *allowed* to spend. The problem lies with the courts who were more interested in protecting the creditors than the crew.
Depends on what company. One headed by people like Ross Perot ( RIP ) definitely will. The other that runs private jail would most likely let people expire if it makes them extra dollar.
It reminds me of the court case that was controversial when Gorsuch was confirmed involving a trucker - "TransAm Trucking v. Dept. of Labour" in particular. It's another case where company property is valued over individuals lives - the case itself hinged on the fact that the employee was free to leave the site on foot but that it was illegal for him to use the tractor half of the truck owned by the employer to reach safety without authorization from the employer. Essentially the ruling of that case leads to the learned lesson that all truck drivers should strap private motorcycles to the sides of their trucks - doing otherwise is irresponsible.
I must be reading it backwards, but wasn't the order eventually upheld that the employee be reinstated? Gorsuch dissented, but he wasn't the one making the ruling. At least thats what the article I just read on it said, but I could be wrong -- it's early in the morning and I only just had my coffee!
> TransAm appealed, but in a 2-to-1 decision, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed the Board’s reinstatement order (TransAm Trucking v. Department of Labor, 2016). Judge Neil Gorsuch dissented.
Am I misunderstanding something? The courts ruled in the truckers favor. Besides, I'm not sure a motorcycle would have saved him from the extreme cold.
Someone is always going to bear responsibility. This is why, when you are incorporating an off-shore company, you need some kind of "representative" in the country itself. These people might be making "free" money but if things turn sour they might find themselves in trouble.
The court did not do some random detention (they did let the rest of the crew) but they declared him the responsible party. In that case, he did break the Egyptian law.
If you are getting a job where you bear a certain responsibility, you have to make sure that the company is not breaking the law through you. You'll be responsible, and worse, if the company is headquartered overseas, you might bear the whole responsibility.
"Powerful people demand that there is always some scapegoat who they can abuse, even if they aren't at fault and it doesn't really help make things better."
You wrote: <<This is why, when you are incorporating an off-shore company, you need some kind of "representative" in the country itself.>> Absolutely not. All kinds of shell corporations are setup with nothing more than a letterbox. Look at the Carribean (incl. Bermuda), Gibraltar, Isle of Man, Langkawi, Singapore, Hongkong (the list goes on and on!). Literally, they have huge numbers of off-shore corporations registered with no one on-shore.
In places with stronger regulation and rule of law, these letterbox shell corporations are not allowed or strictly regulated.
I am not certain but from my expierence, it would most likely consist of detention, fear, and likely some torture; to say nothing of the torture it is to take someone's passport and trap them onboard a ship for 4 years.
The other crew left and presumably the captain after this guy signed to stay and be the custodian, there is nothing to indicate in the article he of all the crew was singled out (from memory)
Obviously it doesn’t change the tragic situation, had he not signed up as custodian we’d be reading an article about a ship captain stuck on a ship
Not to victim blame there is a difference between someone stole x thousands from my home vs I lost x thousands investing in an ostrich farm
Both are sad, but ...
Whether or not he signed a form making him custodian is irrelavent. The matter of the fact is, nobody - custodian or not - should be forced to live on a ship against there will and/or have their passport taken/be detained for years for anything not a criminal offense [and in this case ultimately not their responsability, but even if so].
I disagree, ultimately, we the consumers are at fault. We buy the cheapest products (or the flashiest: see Apple) and these are the consequences. Companies have to save costs to compete because we won't agree to pay more. We won't vote for politicians that make everybody's life better: we will vote for politicians who promises that "the other guys" are going to suffer and that "you or your group" is going to have an easy life.
Somewhere down the line, yeah, Egypt is to blame, but we are the source of the problem - we are to blame. If you want these kind of things to decrease, try to buy local products, try to buy second hand, try to vote for the benefit of everybody (not just you or your group), try to pollute less, try to be conscious about the effects of your actions, and be less egoistic.
> I disagree, ultimately, we the consumers are at fault.
Nope. This is a lie fabricated by big corporations so that they don't seem responsible.
People have limited money and time. Just because you buy a more expensive product does not mean it is produced more ethically.
If two companies are selling their product for the same price then the one using non ethical behavior to lower production cost will still make more profit. It has a competitive advantage and will take over the market. Increasing the base price because you as a consumer are willing to pay more does not help the situation.
Some companies advertise with certain labels that imply that they are more ethical. One example of this is called green washing. Most of the time it is an advertisement stunt and does not improve the situation.
The research necessary to ensure the product you buy is ethically produced is way above the scope for an average consumer having a job and other obligations to do.
> We won't vote for politicians that make everybody's life better
Lobbyists have way more power over politicians than the common man trying to vote for the smaller evil.
Only if they are organized do they have a voice. For this they need to first understand that blaming consumers is a lie and that the industry needs to be regulated.
I wonder if sailors can get two passports for this reason (I know in my country you can get two if you plan on visiting both Israel and some other country that's hostile towards Israel).
Not that it would help much, because you'd have to phisically escape anyway.
Read a story of a ship's captain, stuck on the ship at anchor in New Jersey.
There is a mariner's charity in Greater New York that would help out. They would post a bond with ICE and drive the sailor to an airport or another ship.
Well, whether 9/11 security or what, they weren't allowed to do this. So the captain had been on the ship for over a year.
It happens fairly frequently. The owner runs into financial difficulty and the creditors seize the ship. The crew can't leave because they aren't allowed to abandon it, as well as not having a visa to enter the US to get to the airport, nor the money for airfare home.
The locals usually donate food & supplies to the crew.
I'm slightly confused, if the owner can't afford to deal with the costs, they obviously dont have the financial ability to penalize the individual NOT to abandon ship.
That level of cognitive disconnect surely can't be held up as valid in any legal system that has greater cognitive ability to do 'connect the dots drawings'.
There's a couple of reasons why the crew and officers don't just leave. One is that their employment record will show that they left their ship while their contract was still in force, which given that jobs in the industry are highly desirable will make them unemployable.
And the other is that the port authority wants the ship gone, and not vandalized or becoming a hazard to navigation. So they will require someone to stay on board to maintain it and keep it secure. Which can include getting Immigration to forbid the crew entrance to the country. While they are in port, it's much like being in the secure area of an airport - they're in a gray area and aren't actually in any country. So when that happens, it is illegal for them to leave it.
Err here in the United States you have people pissing in bottles and bags because they can't take a break without missing targets. The West is not immune to predatory hiring and employment practices.
Ever been enslaved on a Thai fishing boat? I know a few people who have, including a neighbor that was missing for 3 years. The US has its own problems, but places like Dubai, Southeast Asia, etc. have a much more severe problem with mistreatment and abuse of workers.
Last year a building collapsed here during construction and killed about 60 people. Stuff like that happens all the time.
I lived in Gulf countries for 12 years; I'm well aware of the shitty and life-threatening work conditions for migrant labourers.
I've also lived in the US for 9 years; I'm also well aware of the mistreatment of workers here, such as workers who are undocumented migrants, workers who are prisoners, workers who work gig companies, Amazon workers, and many others.
Normally I don’t engage in these kind of false comparisons and I do know that south east asia has a problem with off shore industrial slavery unprecedented in the USA. Sometimes things are uniquely bad in other parts of the world and there is no domestic comparison. That is certainly the case with the enslaved fishing vessels (although a case can be made about EU/EFTA operated fishing vessels out of Western Sahara and Mauritania).
But now I’m gonna make an exception and point to the Hard Rock building collapse in New Orleans in 2019 which killed 3 workers and injured dozens more[1]. Things like that happen all the time in the US as well.
That Hard Rock building collapse did not seem to be something that happens all the time in the US. That thing got tons of news coverage because it is rare. It definitely happens, but not on the scale of many of the countries it is being compared to in this thread.
I have pissed in a bottle before out of expediency, but I've never spent several years stranded on a ship without power, company, etc, out of free will. Conflating the two seems weird.
Do you piss in a bottle on a daily basis as part of your job? Comparing peeing in a bottle [a few times in your life] for expediency compared to doing it on the daily, seems to be its own conflation.
If my current workplace offered me a 15% raise in exchange for forgoing toilet breaks and pissing in a bottle for the next year, I would go for it.
I'm sure there's a number for which I'd agree to be stranded on a boat off the coast of Egypt without power, but I suspect it's closer to 15x my salary.
As I understand it, this makes the latter 100x worse than the former.
No, you'd need to compare the actual job that requires you to piss in a bottle, along with its salary, not your current job with a 15% bonus tacked on.
Also people don't sign up to be abandoned on a ship, they're not told of that possibility, until it happens. They signed up to be merchant marines or seaman, not prisoners of ghost ships.
Just because you find getting bit by a dog more palatable than falling into a pit of snakes, doesn't make getting bit by a dog okay or acceptable.
I piss in bottles and on the sides of roads on road trips. Sometimes daily, depending on the length of the trip. You make it sound like some great injustice. It's just pissing in a bottle, who cares?
It's pretty offensive to compare this to being held prisoner on a ship.
Doing something freely of choice with no (or very mimial) downside risk, and doing it at the penalty of losing ones jobs, whilst the employer denies the practice, have substantial daylight between them.
I can only assume you have some very deep seated issues around urine and urination? With a totally straight face, you're comparing pissing in bottles with being imprisoned for four years. Amazon could demand full bottles at close of workday, and then pour it on your head, and this comparison would still be farcical. Recalibrate your outrage.
I'm going to blow your mind: RV toilets are just giant bottles with levers and valves.
I am comparing the case of urinating on a roadtrip as a means to save a few minutes on arrival time, with a significant labour force being obligated to do so under terms and conditions of employment whilst their employer loudly and publicly denies this fact. (The fact that the employer later retracted the denail doesn't obviate the predicate clause.)
Your reading of my statement is far from the mark, curiously so.
Please start peeing in bottles daily as part of your job, and let your co-workers know about, note their reaction. This discussion is about unacceptable work hazards, not exclusively about being imprisoned on a ship.
Because Amazon moving killed all other local work opportunities, and also because Amazon did not allow workers access to union organizers and information. The case is probably going to go the NRLB which will rule the election illegal.
Nasty labour practices... It's just slavery. This poor gentleman was forced into slavery.
You're right that this is what we're outsourcing. All of the corporate trade agreements - American manufacturing was shipped overseas, and American labor forced to compete with what is often a modern form of slave labor.
You’re being perfectly accurate; indentured servitude is consistent with both historical understandings of slavery and modern legal definitions; it was certainly distinct from the particular form of chattel slavery that was popular for a few hundred years and fell out of fashion in thr 19th century, and it is useful to be able to distinguish them since they overlapped in time and space, but that particular form of slavery was not the historically dominant form, itself, and it doesn’t make sense to narrow the definition to that particular form.
While, certainly, that form of chattel slavery was the most immediate concern for, say, American abolitionists, I think they would see it as badly missing the point and not actually abolishing slavery if indentured servitude had been restored to replace chattel slavery.
However I found a curious tidbit the other day; the 1619 ship had indentured servants not slaves. Not to belittle their plight, as they were de facto slaves as soon as they got on the ship.
Words have meaning, and the meaning of "slavery" is not "a bad situation". Slavery is alive and well in the world, but this story has nothing to do with it.
They appointed him as a forced custodian and imprisoned him on a boat for 4 years by way of forcing him to be its guardian. That is slavery. Could he quit? Did he have any rights or freedoms while in his situation?
American manufacturing was shipped overseas because, i.e. after, American labor was unable to compete. I'm not sure what "corporate trade agreements" means either; corporations don't make "trade agreements".
I'm also not sure why everyone takes for granted that America not having as many manufacturing jobs is a bad thing...
Manufacturing is like a ladder. When you outsource the bottom, it’s no different than cutting the rungs of a ladder beneath you. Manufacturing is essential to the wealth and prosperity of any nation.
The Source is WW1 and WW2. Germany was the world powerhouse in production not population. Their ability to out manufacture their neighboring countries lead to some pretty horrible things.
Ultimately it’s a tragedy of commons situation and in these instances the only solutions are rigorous regulation or internalization of the costs of externalities. Both won’t happen, because the politics behind it are also a tragedy of commons.
Nit on economic dynamics: more a Greesham's Law circumstance (bad or no regulation drives out good) than a tragedy of the commons (uncontained resource allocation leads to global overuse).
They're similar, but have some significant and relevant distinctions.
> Those very nice buildings in Dubai come from some nasty labour practices
I’ve spent the past few months taking a deep dive into the Dubai real estate market. Excluding some villas, there are maybe 2 or 3 “very nice” buildings.
Many look nice on the outside, but rarely on the inside.
If I had to name an economic system where ordinary people were made to wait for a long time due to pointless and arbitrary decisions made by a bureaucracy that doesn't care about them, capitalism would not be the first thing that came to mind.
We're downvoting you, not because it "hits too close to home", but because we think you're full of baloney. Don't take the downvotes as confirmation that you're right, because they're not.
Your employer has the legal right to tell you whether (and who) you can marry? To tell you where you're allowed to live? Come on. It can simultaneously be true that some people in our society have it bad and also that they have it better than they would have in the middle ages.
You should check out the book "Debt: The first 5000 years" by Graeber. It covers this topic in depth.
My summary won't do it justice, but basically our society has a myth that society has always been capitalistic, but there is some evidence that is not true. It's a pretty interesting take on some fundamental economic thoughts and theories, because the author is an anthropologist.
It's also littered with factual errors (I'm not an academic but even I spotted an outright falsehood), which makes one rather dubious of the overall thesis.
I mean, I think it's sufficient to quote the opening of the article verbatim:
> The history of capitalism is diverse. The concept of capitalism has many debated roots, but fully[quantify] fledged capitalism is generally thought by scholars[specify][weasel words] to have emerged in Northwestern Europe, especially in Great Britain and the Netherlands, in the 16th to 17th centuries.[citation needed] Over the following centuries, capital accumulated by a variety of methods, at a variety of scales, and became associated[by whom?] with much variation in the concentration of wealth and economic power. Capitalism gradually became the dominant economic system throughout the world.[1][2](subscription required)[need quotation to verify][3][need quotation to verify] Much[quantify] of the history of the past 500 years is concerned with the development of capitalism in its various forms.
> It is an ongoing debate within the fields of economics and sociology as to what the past, current and future stages of capitalism are.
This does not leave me filled with confidence that people know what they mean when they mention "capitalism".
The problem is that there are two broad paradigms of what "capitalism" should mean:
1. Whatever the United States does.
This is what most people seem to be talking about when they talk about "capitalism", but it leaves something to be desired on theoretical grounds. Many aspects of it are not particularly economic.
2. An economic system defined... somehow. Mostly by constrast with "communism", which -- unlike "capitalism" -- has a large body of theory attached.
This is what people want to claim they are talking about. It is more or less conceptually incoherent, being defined only as the absence of policies covered by the term "communism". But all of those negative policies are very old, historically.
Nothing you quote suggests that it is a popular opinion among historians that capitalism is an appropriate label for systems used in antiquity though. Marx may have coined the term capitalism to have a term to contrast communism, but it definitely has a large body of theory attached see e.g. Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations."
It is probably better to contrast capitalism with socialism though, and classical economics with communist theory. Not all capitalists ascribe to classical economics, just like not all socialists ascribe to communist theory.
Marx gave capitalism a name to talk about it as a step in the thrust of history, contrasting it with earlier feudalism systems, and to argue that it would inevitably lead to its own destruction while advocating that communism is the logical next step. It wasn't just "anything before communism" even for him.
Keynes, Hayek, and Smith all have a common thread on their belief in the market, despite the fact that they would in many cases advocate for very different policies.
> Marx may have coined the term capitalism to have a term to contrast communism, but it definitely has a large body of theory attached see e.g. Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations."
Is anything about that theory specific to any time period? Does any part of it refer to a system of "capitalism"?
Marx, and those following Marx, wrote their works under the banner of "communism". Adam Smith did not write under any banner. He made observations.
> Marx gave capitalism a name to talk about it as a step in the thrust of history, contrasting it with earlier feudalism systems, and to argue that it would inevitably lead to its own destruction while advocating that communism is the logical next step. It wasn't just "anything before communism" even for him.
You're not getting what I'm saying. Marx gave capitalism a name, OK. Did he give it a definition? The whole problem I'm talking about here is that people use the word "capitalism" without having a meaning in mind for it to refer to.
I'd also say that the relationship between the average 10th-centry peasant and his feudal lord strikes me as a lot less "exploitative" than the typical employee-employer relationship today.
How is a two-way, 'at will', relationship more exploitative than one which comes with legal penalties for choosing to complete your job? (a job that you were born into, I might add)
"At will" is vastly insufficient to generate an equality of power.
The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily: and the law, besides, authorises, or at least does not prohibit, their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work, but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes, the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, or merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks, which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year, without employment.
Under the feudal system, lords had at least a nominal obligation to see to the welfare of their charges. I'm not claiming the relationship was otherwise equal, but that sense of obligation is now all but wholly absent.
Wait, I'm an idiot. I wrote "less exploitative" when I went to write more exploitative. You're right: to say that it's less exploitative would be absurd.
I need to write fewer posts when it's late at night...
Countries mostly become rich by being highly socially organized, and having a high standard for individual contribution.
For example, 'gold' imported by ill-gotten means from some far off land actually provides 0 value in terms of material value creation. Of course 'oil' does, but remember the 'House of Saud' is kept in power by the US not with the promise of US access to 'cheap oil', rather, with the promise it will be sold at full value, on the open market - just not in some kind of strategic/complicated/backwater setup with the then Soviet Union or China. The US didn't 'go in and take all the oil', which they definitely had the power to do.
This exemplifies, in perhaps a crude, ham-fisted realpolitik manner the 'enforcement of trust' in systems I alluded to in my original comment: it's actually the US (and ultimately everyone's) interest to uphold fairly basic commercial and humanitarian standards in the long run.
And to be fair, these problems are to some extent a function of capitalism, because only 'very large' systems have the opportunity to plan on the generational scale, ergo, there's effectively no commercial enterprise for which the implementation of such standards really matters, that's generally the purview of governments.
This feels slightly more true than the comment you responded to. But I feel that important aspects are left out.
I don't feel like I can make much justice for those aspects but here's my two cents: Selling oil on the free market disproportionately benefits those that own the means to process and resell it further. Or rather, those that ultimately coordinate global oil logistics. The global fossil fuel market doesn't exactly seem like a "free" market. There are few players and they are powerful.
> Selling oil on the free market disproportionately benefits those that own the means to process and resell it further.
What is the basis for this comparison? Compare the profit margins of a gas station (tiny) versus the profit margin of a company that needs to purchase fuel to operate a factory (could be anything). Or for that matter a company that needs products produced at one of those factories (the rest of us). The benefit is widespread and it's not at all obvious who benefits most, commodity or not.
Those with exclusive access to the commodity make a lot of money. The Saudi Government, which is actually a 'family', are the richest 'family' on earth by leagues. That's there 'the profit is'.
The means to process and transport oil are commodity, there's very little surplus in it. It just requires a bit of investment, but not much.
Exclusive control of 'easy access to Oil' is overwhelmingly the power in that value chain.
The 'first order' issue is earlier in the process, it's that 'House of Saud' keeps most of the surplus for their family and furthermore use it to do some suppressive things.
The fossil fuel market it is very open, and market oriented. It has obvious geostrategic artifacts (notably the petrodollar, some politicians refusal to build pipelines, military support of interventions, OPEC), but it's generally open season. Nobody controls the flow of spice melange.
People with more resources have been exploiting people with less resources since probably the domestication of animals and plants created sedentary living and the idea of money/credit, perhaps before that even. Not just under capitalism, mind you, but every form of economic system.
I believe resource inequality will exist until free or near-free energy sources are developed, and even then, you still need ever expanding amounts of land/space. I believe it’s a consequence of scarcity and human nature.
As Mark Twain said, "Buy land, they're not making it anymore". Nothing can make land "free". The planet's resources are vast but finite. If people continue reproducing with no limits they're reducing everyone's share of the pie. This is the actual reason why "the poor gets poorer", there's more of them but the resources stay the same.
This is the same logic that explain why building more roads does not reduce traffic congestion, because new demand is created to use the new roads and the traffic stays bad.
Exactly! And I know hardcore capitalist apologists who would say it was his free choice to agree to be legally bound. If you ask me, that’s some next level mental gymnastics, redefining the term “free choice.” But, there are those who disagree with me, and I expect you’ll see some of them show up to react to my comment.
Edit: a few more story details here: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/19/ever-giv... When he rows to shore to get supplies he can only stay for two hours at most as the area is a restricted military zone. Other crew members were repatriated in September 2019, so Mohammad was not alone for 2 years but only for 7 months (which is no less unacceptable). The only reason Mohammad was allowed to leave was thanks to a local union representative who agreed to take his place as the ship’s guardian.
The BBC article makes it feel like he was alone for 4 years and somehow was able to stay alive with no food/water for 3 of them before the ship drifted closer to shore where he could now 'buy food and water'.
The article says he swam ashore to buy supplies. Why can’t he simply walk away and not return to the ship. The article does not clarify that point. Anyone knows?
Because they took his passport away and because he said in a YT video a while back that he still wants to work at sea if/when this is over which would be impossible if he is a “fugitive”
Speaking of the shopping, it actually makes me curious how he has funded buying the food/essentials he needs to survive. I wish that was covered in the story. 4 years is quite a long time, I am not sure how he would be affording it all. Makes me wonder if some kind of charity was helping him out or some local residences maybe. That also makes me wonder if he stayed on the ship all the time or if he also spent some nights with locals.
The circle is centered around Green Island. Several more circles can be seen further south near Ras Abu Rudeis. It seems that water only seems to be displayed near land and is replaced with simulated blue otherwise.
Is there something that could be done by people otherwise uninvolved - like myself, or my fellow HN readers - to help the other ~250 people who are currently stuck in similar situations?
I don’t even know how to go about enumerating who those people are, their ships, or where they are anchored. With that information a well-organized and/or funded group could at least get someone out to these people to check on them, provide basic supplies, and perhaps some form of reliable communications.
A lot of problems seem insurmountable large and complex, and even this one seems so if your goal is to free these people of their legal liabilities - but if you set aside trying to solve the reason they’re stuck onboard these ships in the first place, providing basic humanitarian aid to them seems doable.
In particular, here’s a recent update that sheds some light on why Mr. Aisha remained aboard - in short, he refused to leave unless and until he was paid the wages due to him:
Govt. of Bahrain (7 March 2021)
From Registration of Ships & Seamen Affairs
I would like to highlight few facts as below:
1) Vessel is not abandoned, but under court arrest due to ongoing cases.
2) Seafarer by the name Mohamed Aisha had accepted a court appointment to act as court representative onboard. As such, when the owner repatriated all other crew members he was not allowed to be repatriated by the courts.
3) We had intervened with owner several time and also arranged for the courts to allow his repatriation by appointing another representative, but he decided not to disembark due to outstanding wages.
4) The owners have tried with all resources available to repatriate him but he was not willing to cooperate.
If he is now ready to be repatriated, then the owners are willing to cover such costs of air passage and local charges as a show of our commitment towards him.
This seems like pretty important information if correct. A huge portion of the HN discussion is moot if the Mr. Aisha chose to remain. Seems like he could have continued his fight for the outstanding wages elsewhere.
I totally disagree. Based on sibling comments it seems like some people think this would have legally screwed up his claim to the lost wages, and even if not, giving up your only leverage in this situation is probably not the optimal strategy.
I can see a parallel world where he decided to get off the boat and we're reading an article about how he lost all that time and won't be able to recover wages, and some HN commenter goes "oh well he should have just stayed on the boat, he got off willingly, so all this discussion is moot".
The reality is this guy was put into a nightmare situation by a combination of his company not appearing to have planned properly (or cared enough about this outcome to prepare for it) and Egypt's ridiculous law where someone can be legally responsible for a ship they have no ownership of. Expecting him to correctly navigate international laws to determine what the action is for him to get off the ship but get paid for the time as he deserves seems somewhat ridiculous. In reality, this situation should never have happened in the first place and I place the vast majority of the blame for that on the company and Egypt.
My point was that "I have no legal way to leave" is a different scenario than "I won't leave until I get paid".
Both situations have a tremendous unfairness about them but they aren't the same and I don't think it is unreasonable to think that those details are an important part of the story.
Depending on thtle situation, there is little to no difference between "I have no legal way to leave" and "I have no legal way to leave and be paid for my work".
The vast majority of the world's population is not in a financial situation where they can just write off months of work for no pay, so they might as well have been legally trapped there.
I suspect there is more to the story, but if the GP entry is to be believed how is wasting away by yourself in a tin can trying to recoup wages from an insolvent company for 2 years a more "optimal strategy" than going home to your family and getting on another boat?
Extricate yourself from the system, do not vindicate yourself from within it.
If I understood that correctly, "chose to remain" because if he didn't, he would lose his claim for wages for the time he was stuck on the ship. That's a fair amount of money.
Sure if that is the case, it is not a good trade-off. But that is a much different situation than the one that was communicated by the reporting, which suggested he had no legal way to leave.
I'm still not sure I have an accurate picture of the situation.
They can, but will they? It is really tricky to handle this type of thing without declaring war. It's is also tricky for the other country to do this without getting war declared on them.
It definitely sounds like he got at the very least a shitty deal. If you don't have time to watch, he mentions he feels he signed something he didn't fully understand, leaving him liable as guardian, passport seized and all.
In this particular instance, that seems to be the case. I imagine there are probably legal hurdles that needed to be overcome to even make that happen, but I’m glad it did.
I just sent an email to the International Maritime Organization, who manages the database I linked in the GP, to ask if there are any extant organizations dedicated to providing relief to people in similar situations. I’ll update here when and if I hear back from them, or as I make progress toward figuring out the scope of this issue in other ways.
I don’t necessarily disagree, but I don’t have the ability to easily influence that. I might have the ability to make people’s lives easier in similar situations.
I wonder if there is any value in supervising the boat if it has no power... No power means no engines, no lights and no radios. That means even if the boat was robbed, there is nothing the supervisor could do about it.
It is supremely unfair for the court to assign him full responsibility for the ship, but without any power over it. If the court were serious about the situation they should have handed the ship over to him entirely. He could then put the ship up on the market for whomever wanted to buy it or sell it to a scrapping company.
If you think this would be unfair to the ships owners this is exactly the point. Force them to fix the situation or lose control of it entirely. Don't leave an actual human in some Kafkaesque nightmare of being jailed on a derelict vessel because you are terrible at running a shipping company. The article says there are hundreds of these cases around the world, and because only regular people are being harmed nobody is trying that hard to fix it. This is unconscionable.
Edit: Fixed my faulty memory about the number of ships in this situation.
Yeah I don't understand what value there is here in assigning it to the crew member who apparently can't decline?
Even if he could manage the ship, a random crew member is highly unlikely to have resources to care for a ship like that... what value is there in assigning him this responsibility? They just punishing someone for the sake of it?
> Yeah I don't understand what value there is here in assigning it to the crew member who apparently can't decline?
The article doesn't state it really explicitly but I believe he was able to decline but maybe not aware of when that decision would need to be made - specifically this passage here:
> "I can't force a judge to remove the legal guardianship," a representative [of the shipping company] told us. "And I can't find a single person on this planet - and I've tried - to replace him."
> Mohammed, they said, should never have signed the order in the first place.
It sounds like he signed a thing without fully understanding the ramifications of it - some eygptian official might have pulled a sneaky to trick him into signing it without full knowledge of the consequences or he may have simply acted unwisely but, either way, I'd hold the shipping company completely at fault for letting this situation develop - they had options to replace him (for instance, one of the actual owners could've stepped up and owned their error), or provided clear guidance and legal advice to the crew members.
The fact that the captain GTFO'd before any of this really started to go down really reinforces that this guy was left holding the short end of the stick and the company itself is pretty insanely slimy for not, at least, attempting to continue to support him.
Swimming to shore to get fresh water is a seriously messed up scenario.
I might be misunderstanding the situation, but it sounds like the original captain knew what was going on and sacrificed Mohammed for his own freedom. I assume the captain has original responsibility in this case. The captain left the ship and never came back. He presumably told Egyptians that his first officer is now in charge, or the Egyptians boarded the ship and determined that the First Officer was the highest ranking official on the ship.
Either way it sounds like the Captain probably knew what was going on. When the Captain learned that the parent company had ran out of money, he probably was aware of these cases of seafarer abandonment and decided he didn't want to be one of them. So he left the ship, leaving the responsibility on Mohammed.
Mohammed claimed he didn't really know the meaning of this responsibility until everyone else started disembarking. It sounds like by then the captain had been gone, for at least 4 months, and potentially longer.
The Captain sacrificed Mohammed here. Either way, someone was going to be abandoned on that vessel. I think the Captain saw the writing on the wall and abandoned quickly, shifting responsibility onto someone else.
There are lots of people at fault here. Egyptian authorities, Tyson Shipping and Marine Company (which seems to have continued operating despite all this), and the Captain. Unfortunately Mohammed is one of the innocent ones caught in the middle. He shouldn't have signed the paper as the shipping company is quick to point out. But that doesn't resolve the real issue. It would have just meant the Captain or someone else would have been forced into this situation.
>I'd hold the shipping company completely at fault for letting this situation develop - they had options to replace him
Why? Then there would be someone else stuck in that situation. The problem is almost entirely with the Egyptian authorities. Such a situation shouldn't even be possible to develop. The first mate in the article might not have understood the ramifications of what he signed, but the Egyptian court certainly did.
There are all kinds of reasons for why a shipping company would be unable to help. That doesn't mean it should leave a person in a legal limbo. That's on the country rather than the company.
I'm surprised the guy didn't just leave. A country whose laws don't respect you doesn't deserve respect in return.
I'm really unfamiliar with maritime laws but I wouldn't be surprised if seizing unmanned boats that are flying the flags of a different country but within your waters is somehow a touchy international grey-zone.
This situation was created by the country essentially leaving a 4k tonne vessel derelict off the coast of Eygpt after failing to pay to fuel its ride home so there isn't going to be an easy answer here. It might be that the company had some act-of-god like circumstance happen (like an employee fraudulently embezzling funds and tampering with a fuel gauge to make it look like the ship had far more fuel than it did though... that's insanely unlikely given how shifty everyone is acting).
Egypt might be in a position where they've got a rusting leaking hunk of trash off their coast that they can't remove without causing an international incident and, forcing some member of the company to remain with the wreck might just be intended to force the company to actually call in salvagers to resolve the situation (which would likely be a large asset loss for the company).
I really don't think Egypt is likely the worst actor in this situation but it was cruel what they put this man through. Ideally the administrator trying to untangle this POS would realize this employee has essentially no power to resolve the situation and release them home - but his options to escape were likely pretty few.
If you're a passing ship the last thing you want to do is piss off Egypt since the country is pretty corrupt and controls the Suez Canal (which you plan on sailing through if your ship is anywhere in the neighborhood) - getting on their bad side is likely a one-way ticket to random inspections and tariffs or an outright ban and the only land close enough for the man to flee to was Egypt itself - so he'd need to sneakily emigrate... he's heading back to Syria so that means he'd need to cross the Egyptian-Israeli border under the radar and potentially without a passport - and probably with very little cash.
I really feel for this dude when he says he was struggling with depression because his situation was utterly screwed - the universe really wasn't on his side.... buuuut, I think the company owning the ship comes out the worst. The article doesn't have the details but something seriously slimy was going on there.
>Egypt might be in a position where they've got a rusting leaking hunk of trash off their coast that they can't remove without causing an international incident and, forcing some member of the company to remain with the wreck might just be intended to force the company to actually call in salvagers to resolve the situation
Removing a ship could cause an international incident, but forcing a person to stay alone on a ship without proper living conditions for years wouldn't? Imagine if the guy wasn't Syrian, but was an American instead. This would've either been resolved quickly or there would've been an international incident that would've put the removal of a ship to shame.
>Why? Then there would be someone else stuck in that situation.
The CEO was the right person to to replace him immediately until they could make it a sufficiently attractive proposition that someone else would want to do it. You know by the usual means. Pay, supply drops, fuel for power etc.
The shipping company's CEO is 100% responsible for not dealing with the situation properly because they absolutely did not do that in any way, shape or form. It's so bad I would have no issue with the company being blacklisted as a criminal organisation.
>The shipping company's CEO is 100% responsible for not dealing with the situation properly because they absolutely did not do that in any way, shape or form.
And if the company went bankrupt or the CEO suddenly died/disappeared? Then what? There could be any number of reasons why a company might be unable to do what they need to do. The guy is still stuck there then, because it all rests on the shipping company rather than the country whose government is holding him there.
Running and hiding when insolvency hits is illegal in most places. But sure, it's certainly possible that this has happened to his employer while that company who employ him is still providing quotes about it being impossible to find anyone who would take his place but not paying him either.
So in insolvency that is deemed bankruptcy the assets of the company are traditionally used to deal with as much of the liabilities of the company as they can in rank order of those liabilities. You know secured debt ranks ahead of unsecured etc.
This guy's claim on the assets of the company to get him out of that hell, for me, rank number 1, and alone. Next comes the wages due all employees not deprived of their liberty. And that's the usual way it is done too.
I'm not talking about this specific instance. I'm saying that companies can fail to do something due to myriad reasons. You shouldn't tie a third party's freedom (the ship's "legal guardian") to a company behaving correctly. If the company doesn't deal with the jeopardy a person is in then governments should try to resolve it in a reasonable timeframe or at least create reasonable accommodations until the situation is resolved.
Nup. Not even close. Choosing to dump your employee in hell is /wrong/. There is no excuse in this instance or any. There's a different choice you can make so make it. The end. The local laws that are a necessary condition for your employee being retained in hell are simply not interesting if you have the choice to get them out of hell. It is clear that this is a choice. But sure, the company could also agitate for legal reform in Egypt once they secured the liberty of their employee. That's a responsible thing to do.
Then if a company has behaved abysmally by choosing to dump their employee in hell then the law needs to be involved on those making that decision. Absolutely. There needs to be consequences for making that /choice/. As was clearly made in this instance assuming the accuracy of the report.
Then whoever was second in command at the company sells off the ship (probably at a loss) and uses some of the money to send the first officer home. If they can't afford to keep the ship then they shouldn't sit on the title and trap one of their own employees in a derelict floating prison.
>And if the company went bankrupt or the CEO suddenly died/disappeared?
If the company did well instead of go bankrupt who is cashing the biggest check? That is who is responsible. Work your way down that list until you find someone, everyone you can't find is a fugitive and has their assets seized.
Yea, additionally, the guy was staying on the boat unpaid for the duration - so it's a lot easier to read their actions as pure greed.
There's also a good chance they could've declared the ship lost at sea and either scuttled it or offered it for a dollar (or other token currency amount) to salvage companies.
I think his job was basically security guard for the property. Also, if the ship were to come unmoored and collide with another vessel they would need someone to blame.
But why can't he quit? If the owning company didn't assign another guard that's their fault, not the guard. Imagine if a chauffeur was forever assigned to a car because it broke on a disabled parking place. It would just get towed and the bill or court order sent to the actual owner and the chauffeur can quit.
100% blame on Egypt here for a stupid rule ignoring consequences.
Preventing unmooring probably requires to repaint/reoil the moor every few months to prevent rust. I wonder whether 1 person is enough to take care of the remaining maintenance of a wreck: electrical boards, meals, rats... Crews are also constantly repainting the hull while at sea, this is why it still takes 20 crew on top of a captain to man a ship.
I'm sure he had no supplies for basic maintenence, but the law still requires someone to hold accountable so it would be him.
It would be interesting if this did happen and the court found him guilty of dereliction of duty for not conjuring replacement parts out of thin air. Would he be sent to a land prison or back to the prison of the ship?
If the poster meant “people legally designated as fathers” and was referring to, e.g., the presumption (conclusive in some jurisdictions) of paternity based on marriage at time of birth, its not completely senseless.
Isn't there a law at sea where if you find an abandoned ship, it is basically yours? Perhaps this law doesn't apply in Egyptian national waters?
If he is the legal guardian of the ship, why wouldn't he be able to just sell it for profit and move on? Was it just that there would be no buyer for it, even to scrap it? Or could there have been fines/liens on that ship such that no one would want to buy it? If that is the case it seems odd that he couldn't himself abandon the ship to the lien holders.
International salvage law is complex, but essentially no. The ship is stills owned.by someone even when at the bottom of the sea and if you take anything from the ship without permission that is theft.
Salvagers work on contract with the owners in most cases. When they don't there are generally big lawsuits because they are entitled for compensation for their work, but if they don't give anything brought up back the the owners they are in possession of stolen property, and the law around this is complex.
If the vessel is more than 1000 years old we probably can't trace an onwer anymore and you can get by with calling it abandoned in some cases. Though even here the country who's waters it is in might consider the wreck a treasure.
He is the guard, not the owner. As such he can't sell it. The owners are probably in complex bankruptcy court and the lien holders will eventually get to figure out what to do with it, but that will take years to resolve. Indeed the expense of resolving this might be more than the ship is worth so nobody actually wants to resolve it.
The company also owes him a salary, he is in possession of company property, selling said property to recuperate lost salary seems reasonable.
I'm no lawyer (so don't try this at home), and I bet you'd need to find a good lawyer to get a with a trick like that :)
But as a creditor in possession of property owned by the debitor, selling said property to recuperate losses doesn't seem entirely unreasonable.
Certainly, not if debitor does not take action recover possession of the property, etc.
Even if he got into trouble after selling the ship, I would hope a jury would side the person being held for "ransom by said property".
But yes, between Egyptian and Syrian courts, I suppose there is a serious risk you'll get squashed either way. Because we can't have sailors selling their ships :)
Depends. If the Navy lost then the winner might own them. Reciently the remains of WWI ships that Germany scuttled so they couldn't be captured, went on eBay (the ships were intured in an English harbor at the time). They are considered a public attraction, so the owner won't be allowed to do anything other than grant permission to visiting divers.
A lot of shipping issues are complicated because we have no global government and we have a lot of international waters and shipping, by its very nature, tends to involve ships passing from one legal jurisdiction to another repeatedly.
It's not about not wanting to offend wealthy people. It's in part a matter of "Who has authority here?"
There's a lot I don't understand about it, but this seems like it's probably a fairly modern development and it's high time we created meaningful solutions so this cannot happen again.
Glad to see he got free and a reporter was talking to him and he was broadcasting via internet. But that should not be how something like this gets resolved, on some kind of ad hoc basis after so long.
And someone here said someone volunteered to take his place, so it's apparently not really resolved, though he got relief.
The problem was that this man >>signed<< a document where he agreed to be "legally bound to this ship"... So be careful before you are signing something...
You are putting way to much stock in "signing a document". Anybody can document an injustice, and make it feel "justified" - but that doesn't make it justified. If I were to convince someone to sign a document saying they have to work for me for free, I'm still a slaveholder. Pick which one - morality or legality - there is no way that document should have been held as valid for longer than a few months, nor was there any way that document was morally ok
Alternatively - if you're not in the Eygptian legal system - be careful of trying to make someone sign something they don't comprehend - in the US at best the contract will be invalidated and at worst you might be held responsible for any damages if it was your job to clearly communicate the rights the parties had w.r.t. the contract before signing.
That all said - that's a hard battle and one you're probably not going to win unless you a) don't be speak english or b) don't have full control of your mental faculties - "I couldn't be arsed to read the contract" is generally not a defense unless the contract goes out of its way to be intentionally misleading.
We don't know what the situation was here. It could even be that all the sailors were required to sign some standard-looking documentation (no idea what, agreement to terminate their contract with x% of salary, papers allowing them to enter Egypt) before leaving the ship, but he was given something that was different and bound him to the ship as its guardian. Your advice still stands of course.
> It is supremely unfair for the court to assign him full responsibility for the ship, but without any power over it. If the court were serious about the situation they should have handed the ship over to him entirely. He could then put the ship up on the market for whomever wanted to buy it or sell it to a scrapping company.
This doesn't really solve the problem, it just moves the problem around to the free market. What if no one wanted to buy it for scrap? Would he be responsible for cleaning up the situation himself? The court should have impounded the ship using Egypt's own coast guard and billed the company for the coast guard's time.
The ship looked quite large. I would imagine scrappers in Turkey or Pakistan would have paid well, considering the price of steel. But you'd need investors to pay for transport and any Egyptian fees. And to secure investors you'd need to resolve property rights, at least tentatively, to the point the ship could be released, likely requiring some experienced maritime lawyer able to work quickly to avoid getting bogged down in litigation.
I bet there would be significant profit in it, at least from the perspective of a handful of individuals, and especially if things could be arranged to make the sailor judgment proof--e.g. have his share of any proceeds go to family members--so free loaders (i.e. lazy ship owners, clients, and insurers) couldn't swoop in at the end to claim any proceeds. But it's not just a matter of profit; it's a matter of opportunity costs. All the parties most capable of pulling this off clearly felt there was moreprofit to be had by walking away and pursuing other opportunities.
Surely people on HN understand this phenomenon: there are an infinite number of profitable opportunities out there, but some are better than others, and there's only a finite amount of time and capital.
Suppose he did sell the ship, without proper authority, wouldn’t that be a civil matter between he and the owners? It was basically derelict, right? It seems like a salvage company could come in, pay any fines to Egypt, fuel the ship a d then drive it away and it would be theirs. That further incentives the owners to handle their business.
It would probably be difficult to find a salvage company willing to take on that much legal risk.
Maybe the guy could have made some calls down to Somalia and convinced some pirates that a big prize was ripe for the taking if they were willing to take a road trip?
I don't know how collateral on a mortgage on a ship this size works. But I am pretty sure even if they handed it to him, he couldn't do anything with it because it would have a Lein on it.
Lein’s don’t normally work that way after a boat was seized. Handing it to the remaining sailor isn’t identical, but don’t assume loans have much weight here.
The mess of US civil forfeiture laws originally showed up in maritime law such that the owners and outstanding loans became irrelevant. In effect the physical object is what’s confiscated breaking any ties to anyone that had a prior ownership stake.
A friend of mine who's working on installing multimedia systems on luxury yacht told me a recent story today: a woman came from Florida to work on a yacht that was called by his owner to some place. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to her she had COVID. all of the 12 crew members went sick; the boat stopped at Malta, and 2 stewards died. As the ship was late and stranded, the owner simply fired all of the remaining people onboard, sick as they were, because he wanted his boat back. Then, the lady, stranded without resources in La Valette and probably under crushing guilt committed suicide.
Not to compare bad vs worse, but when I get bored for ten minutes I tend to remember that at least I'm not in Otokichi's crew:
> The ship, without a mast or a rudder, was carried across the northern Pacific Ocean by currents. It drifted for 14 months, during which the crew lived on desalinated seawater and on the rice of their cargo.
You don't even need to go back that far. Just look at the story of Jose Alvarenga from a few years ago. He was adrift in the Pacific in a tiny fishing boat for the same amount of time:
I saw this video from Chief MAKOi (who has an excellent youtube channel in general) about this situation a week ago. It seemed rather hopeless for him at the time considering that it was going on for four years already. I wonder if that video contributed to pressure to fix the situation, it does have almost a million views.
I'm not clear what Egypt's goal was by forcing this man to stay aboard the ship. Simply declaring him the guardian never made it so. He was never going to be able to resolve the issues himself and it appears the owners have simply abandoned it and written it off. If Egypt can't get money from the owners, then, as owners of the canal, deny other of their ships passage through it.
It's real hard to tell as a non-Egyptian trying to Google enough case law to understand it, but the best I can figure is that the precedent is based upon the assumption that the ship's owner has interest in how the ship fares while the ship is arrested. Ostensibly, the requirement of custodianship should be protecting the interests of the owner... But since the owner could sue Egypt if their ship is damaged while it is kept in the country's care, Egypt mandates someone the owner designates stand watch.
... but, of course, that whole arrangement is predicated on the assumption the owner cares, at all, about the fate of the ship or its crew. Which is, perhaps, a philosophical throwback to a time when ships were the entire livelihood of a town and not assets that multinational corporations own hundreds of.
If he had silently sneaked off the ship, would someone have noticed? How long would it take for anyone to notice that a ship without power and crewed by just 1 person was actually abandoned?
I was wondering about this. My guess (just a guess) was that since he wants to still work in this industry, he was afraid that abandoning the ship would hurt his career? Either that, or he's just an incredibly responsible person.
From the article, he did sneak off the ship routinely after it ran aground some years later. He would sneak off, buy food and recharge his phone, then return to the ship for some bizarre reason.
I believe he was allowed to go to shore. Unfortunately, the closest place is a restricted military area and he was only allowed to stay for 2 hours each visit. He cannot even sneak off as he is getting into a military base for food, water and power. If it has been a civilian area, he could have just stayed on the land.
It is a sad state of affairs, whichever way you look at it.
That region is experiencing a lot of chaos and I'd say that being alone on a ship is a lot safer than being alone with no passport and wanted by the law.
They don't care.
Just to let you know how bad are we treated. As a Syrian, I should exchange 100 dollars to enter the country. Some people were stuck at the border with Lebanon when that bill was issued and a woman died waiting for someone to bring her the 100 dollars (or 200 because he also needs to go back).
We pay 800 euros to get our 2 years of validity passports.
A couple of weeks ago, I had to wait from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. to get the embassy in Berlin to attest my signature on the passport.
I had to wait 4 hours to attest my papers at the totally empty embassy in Jakarta.
A random Syrian, or someone 'without passport' is not going to raise any scrutiny in Egypt. Just a few handfulls of cash could have expedited his way to at least Lebanon.
There's something odd about this story because neither a passport nor money should have kept him there, unless there was literally some kind of watch for him, and/or the cash situation was really that extremely dire. That said, he was able to survive for 4 years so money had to be coming from somewhere.
I suggest that he was maybe being paid a tiny amount, and that he felt it'd be better to 'stick it out' as a nearly worthless cog, than to take a risky path home to what might be nothing anyhow.
Why would you write an article like this without a word describing the legal consequences of leaving the ship? What consequence would be worth four years of your life?
Edit: a more useful video linked below explains that the authorities confiscated his passport. That would make it difficult to leave. Though I'd probably try anyway after a year of that.
I saw this video[1] on Youtube that goes a bit more in depth into the situation. Apparently after he became the legal guardian of the ship, the Egyptian govt took his passport to prevent him from leaving.
I imagine that a legal system that forces a random guy to stay trapped on a ship for four years would do something worse to someone who defies their order.
I would have had my brother dinghy out to me one of the passes.... I guess though since this is in a major shipping lane you'd probably get taken out by a ship.
If they've got his passport and he can't leave the only option is Egypt. I expect he thought of that and they refused.
ETA: I've read a few of these articles over the last year. There have been many similar cases because of covid. It seems to be completely normal practice for countries to refuse visas to ships' crew.
He was on a ship, alone, with no power/sanitation etc.
How is this not inhumane and cruel? I can understand confiscating someone's passport if that person is a criminal, but this? This is like Saudi Arabia taking the passports of its laborers.
It is insane that things like this happen, in 2021
I'm curious, if he did manage to get on a ship surely he'd be able to return home to Syria on a ship bound there?
I mean, if you're an American citizen heading home and you lose your passport on the walkway to board your plane in France... it's not like America's going to prevent you from entering, right?
Surely it's gonna take some time to verify who you are and fix the situation. But it's not like you're forever banned from your own country.
Leaving Egypt might have been too difficult logistically to pull off, but once he had I don't see any legal difficulty returning home.
According to US law (and I am assuming Syrian law) that is true...assuming the government is stable and the country doesn't have a devastating stalemated civil war. Getting into Syria with a legal passport is difficult enough, and Syrian border officials would have good reason to suspect that he was a foreigner. He would likely be thrown on a plane to Cairo and told to figure it out at the Syrian embassy. Although now that I write it out maybe this wouldn't have been a terrible option (albeit Kafkaesque and prone to several bureaucratic failures - and it doesn't solve the problem of him "abandoning his post" and breaking Egyptian law).
Even so, US authorities do not just take "sorry fellow USicans, I lost my passport" at face value and will likely detain you until you are able to prove you are a citizen, and put you through quite a bit of extra screening and interrogation. Realistically it would be less of an issue for a white person with a bland American accent, since Border Patrol would probably let you call a lawyer or family member to bring a birth certificate. But I am quite sure an El Salvadoran-American who forgot his passport would not be able to enter the US from Mexico without incredible legal difficulty - again to the point where it would be faster and considerably less traumatizing to just go to a consulate and wait a few weeks.
If your livelihood depends on shipping, being unable to return to Egypt likely represents a significant barrier to obtaining future employment. Also, he may just have been extradited back to Egypt by another government.
As he said in the article, it is because he has no intention of abandoning his profession and will resume working, meaning if he had left the ship his career would been ruined.
He would be a fugitive. Not everyone wants to do that. People in the US sometimes get jailed for years without conviction pending a trail. Why don’t they break out and leave the country? Because that would be a worse situation.
The saddest part of this unfair ordeal is that his mother died while he was confined to this ship, and he couldn’t go visit her or attend the funeral. This article notes, he contemplated suicide then.
Shipping companies regularly do this to their crew, abandoning them when the costs of properly managing the situation aren’t worth it to them. Note that ship abandonment is also what led to the devastating explosion in Beirut, Lebanon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Rhosus
If you are at the point where your family is dying, and you are contemplating suicide, the only rational choice is burn down the ship to smithereens and leave it at the bottomn of the ocean. Or rip it to bit and sell the parts.
I hope he is able to profit from his story with book and/or movie rights. It's a fascinating story and I bet would make a great movie a la Captain Phillips or 127 Hours.
The movie Life of Pi also comes to mind in regards to being stuck on a boat and retelling the story but Mohammed’s experience would make a great survival movie no doubt. Maybe Netflix will make a deal with him
> The Aman's owners, Tylos Shipping and Marine Services, told the BBC they had tried to help Mohammed but that their hands were tied.
> "I can't force a judge to remove the legal guardianship," a representative told us. "And I can't find a single person on this planet - and I've tried - to replace him."
Well, obviously nobody would volunteer unless things were going to change.
But surely the ships operating company had violated their operating agreement, giving the owner grounds to "evict" them, find a new operator, get the updated safety equipment and classification certificates, and pay for the fuel. Once that was done surely the ship would be unseized, and with a new crew installed, Egypt ought to be happy to cancel the guardianship.
This was all especially true back before it ran aground.
It would also seem like this all would be very much in the owner's interest as letting the ship decay cannot be good for the ships value, and they probably were not getting paid rent by the current operator for this.
But I'm guessing there is a lot more to this that the BBC article has left out.
Even more surprising that there’s one situation still ongoing:
> Meanwhile, at the Iranian port of Assaluyeh, 19 mostly Indian crew members of the bulk carrier Ula are on hunger strike after their vessel was abandoned by its owners in July 2019.
If you're interested in shipping I highly recommend the YouTube channel of Chief Engineer Makoi https://www.youtube.com/c/ChiefMAKOi. He has been talking about Mr. Aisha's situation for some time now. Really awesome to see that he's been relieved.
I don't understand what use he was on that ship? And can't they find any out of work person from shore to take his place? I'm sure there are dozens lining up to get that job for a few pennies an hour. And they might just have family in the area that can help sustain them.
The article says he wasn't paid, at least part of the time. But what I'm saying is that this whole practice makes no sense. There must be people on shore who would be willing to be custodians of abandoned ships.
That's a business idea, start an office offering ship custodians for shipping companies. When they get in trouble they can hire your custodian instead of stranding one of their own employees far from home.
This business wouldn't work out, because you expect to be paid. Stranded employees get stranded because they are seen as expendables, ones that don't need to be paid.
Yeah sure it wouldn't work without a global change in policy too. Because right now shipping companies are just leaving their ships because of hardships, so to think they'd hire someone is silly.
But with policy changes one can imagine a future where sailors prefer employers who have a contract with ship custodians before signing up with them, thereby voting with their employment.
In the article it states that he started swimming to shore only after the ship had run aground a few hundred meters from the shore. So the question remains, how did he sustain himself beforehand? Did the ship have years worth of supplies for him on board?
I was wondering the same thing, since the ship had no power either perishables would go bad quickly, also where did he get money to buy food later on? Was it his savings?
The article names 2019 as when he totally ran out of fuel. I assume there were previously enough rations on board (it was stocked for an entire crew before being abandoned), and perhaps he made a deal with the visiting guard to bring food.
A bit of hacking, some solar panels, a few stereos, tents, some poker chips, a rock band's visit... how long before the authorities would force him off? How many bitcoins would have he raked?
(OK this is thinking different in a slightly hollywoodesque way... still)
I don't get it. I might be misunderstanding things, but my understanding is that here in Norway the owner of a vessel has the ultimate responsibility in cases like these. Why is the Egyptian law this way? It doesn't seem very practical to legally require this one guy to stay on board, what problem is that supposed to solve?
No, they wouldn’t; heck, his case has gotten attention recently because the crew of the Ever Given has become similarly trapped, and his case has been held up as an example of what might happen to that crew if the dispute between the SCA, and the owners and operators of the Ever Given continues.
According to the International Labour Organization, there are more than 250 active cases around the world where crews are simply left to fend for themselves. It says 85 new cases were reported in 2020, which is twice as many as in the previous year.
Now that's a sad piece of information I read today.
I started to write a comment about why international law doesn’t require ship owners to post a bond superior to other debt blah blah blah. Then I realized I am out of my element. I am like a child walking into the middle of a movie and wants to know what’s going on.
The original problem wasn't lack of fuel, it was inspection issues. They only ran out of fuel after being trapped and running the generators for electricity. In fact the ship probably still has a usable supply of bunker fuel on board so it wouldn't be that hard to get it to port, except that it is still trapped in the original legal limbo.
After 4 years of deferred maintenance the engines are going to need some TLC before they can be fired up again. The longer the ship sits idle the worse the situation becomes. Left long enough and some fitting somewhere will corrode through or be damaged in a storm and without power to run the pumps the ship will start slowly sinking.
The Egyptian legal system is not known for its fairness... the World Justice Project ranks it 125 of 128 surveyed countries, in last place out of 8 countries in the Middle East[1]
Similarly (and tragically) the Syrian government is not known for its compassion towards its distressed citizens.
>World Justice Project ranks it 125 of 128 surveyed countries
Man considering the scale here that's horrific.
But I guess that would explain a process here where they seem to punish someone... 'just because', and with no value coming from the process at all.
It's just injustice for no reason at all.... I can understand corruption to some extent. They get something, but punish this guy for no value, I don't get it.
I can think of two incentives for punishing this guy for no value: First, it will appear that they have “done something about it”, say, to their superiors. Second, some people also feel good if they can put someone down or enforce a loss on someone; It’s a stunted heuristic for them “winning”.
So there is very clear value in it. If the harm is disregarded.
Of course, many third world nations have little regard for their multitude of poor citizens. But I think it's important to high light the way that in situations like this, these nations are forced to accept that the "laws of the sea" trump their own laws and then wind-up unable/unwilling to intervene when a ship, a load of goods or a person winds-up in international legal limbo - the true, horrific poster-child for this was the disastrous Beirut explosion. Enough explosives to level half the city sat in legal limbo for years ... until they did that, yeah. And as we see here, there are many terrible but more mundane examples.
Most people may think I’m being pessimistic and jaded. But I think these rankings are hilarious (in a bad sense). Just like the corruption rankings that come out.
The US gets a green square and a high rank, smaller countries are corrupt and unfair. I could fill up paragraphs about how corrupt and dysfunctional our (US) legal and political systems are. Meanwhile I spent a long time in Central Africa (a red square country) and know to compare.
Same. I help put deals together with some experience in SE Asia. The ability to enforce contract and property rights in the US, with ready access to the courts and relatively clear rules, sets the US apart in terms of business efficiency and predictability. In my assessment, it's a large part of what's made the US so prosperous. In contrast, dealing with corrupt officials in smaller countries in SE Asia is just wild.
Yes, the U.S. has gone to great length to ensure the smooth operation of business. In fact you might say this is essentially the primary purpose of U.S. legal system. As an example, one researcher looked at all the Supreme Court cases involving the 14th amendment between 1870 and 1940. The 14th amendment as you'll recall is an amendment focused on the individual equal protections people have under the law. I cannot recall the figures exactly, but of some 100+ cases ~70% pertained to business and around a dozen were focused on violations of individual's rights.
Property rights are an especially important tool when it comes to the operation of a materially wealthy society. But their imposition does not somehow guarantee that a society is more just or fair and less corrupt than any other.
Edit: I looked up the figures in my notes. The paper involved all Supreme Court cases involving the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The court struck down 232 state laws, 179 of the decisions were in favor of corporations, 55 were in favor of the growing railroads and 9 were in favor of individual black petitioners.
The paper isn't online and I don't have access to it anymore to check but I believe it is this paper.
"Protecting Corporations Instead of the Poor" by Alec Karakatsanis in Harvard Law Review 275.
Correct, the US has an excellent legal system for the maintenance of property and commerce, but from the human point of view it is a disaster. After all, just considering the maintenance of racial disparities at the judicial level over several decades will tell that this is not a functioning system.
Can you consider it such a "disaster" when so many from all around the world are desperate to move here? I realize that's kind of a cliche' right-wing talking point, but it still seems some relatively is merited.
People want to move because they need the jobs! As I said, the US has a great justice system for commercial enterprises. But from the human point of view it is a disaster.
You’re right. The US has predictable rules and outcomes and very civilization-friendly laws. It also has the power to enforce law & order within its own borders.
By contrast, especially in Central Africa, the borders on the map are largely aspirational on the part of the governments. Even the word “Democratic” in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is a bad joke. The dominant local power in most of that landmass is more likely to be a warlord/crime boss than the government.
> The dominant local power in most of that landmass is more likely to be a warlord/crime boss than the government.
I would argue this is a false statement. There are pockets of instability there, especially near Goma and Virunga or very rural areas. The last few years especially have been unstable. But if you look at the country as a whole (which is the size of all Western Europe) over the last 15 years, the size of the territory not controlled by the internationally recognized legitimate government has been very small.
We can argue about definiton of words like legitimate, control, and “very small”.
But a better test is this: would you go for a drive there with your family? Would you invest billions in a multi-decade mining project there - if you had to depend on the government’s version of law & order only?
You are making the assumption that "investing billions of dollars" is synonymous with all other forms of justice. During the Junta in Chile for example, you were very safe to invest. You were probably even safe to go for a drive. But the system was grotesque on the whole. I think the point people are trying to make is that
1) It varies far too much from country to country to generalize in this way.
2) Justice is patchy and even across many areas of law depending on where you are.
Not once, but multiple times I've had police simply steal cash from me in the states. Not civil forfeiture, but the cash in a wallet disappears on it's way to where it's held temporarily, no crimes involved. And from rich areas like Boulder, CO.
I have not seen the lack of low level corruption in the states compared to other countries. Like in other countries they simply confine their corruption to those powerless to do anything about it.
Did this happen at a traffic stop? Did you give them your wallet when they asked for your license? I don’t think I’ve ever given a cop my wallet. I take the ID out and hand that to them. If they asked me for the wallet, I would feel powerless to say no, I just have never been asked. I’m not defending the police here, this behavior is disgusting, just trying to understand the circumstances in which this occurred.
Also, I’m low-key wondering if I should start handing the cop my wallet. They never give me a warning, maybe if they got some money out of the interaction they’d start...
One example, at a large party during college, my wife's coat was stolen. The thieves took her credit cards, left the rest of the wallet, and dumped the coat on an unrelated house's front lawn. Unbenownst to the thieves, this house was owned by a professor who she was close with. He had searched the coat and found the cash in another pocket. When he was unable to reach her via cellphone, he took the coat to the police, ultimately concerned about my wife's physical safety who then confiscated the coat, the cash, and the wallet. He then came directly to our house from the police (for the second time, he tried our house before we arrived back home and before he went to the police), and after being extremely relieved that she wasn't dead in a ditch or something, informed us of both the coat's location (with the police, and the specific station and officer he talked with) and the contents he had discovered including the cash that my wife had not stored in her wallet but instead an inner pocket. When we went to the police they informed us that both the intake form for the property detailing what had been dropped off had gone missing, and that no cash was present nor had been turned in.
This exactly. In the US it is common for police to steal from citizens if they feel they can get away with it, I know many people who have had it happen to them personally, both with cash and possessions.
Right the US has rule of law for businesses. What about poor people? Not so much. See: civil asset forfeiture, being jailed for petty fines you can’t afford to pay, insane fees used by low-tax jurisdictions to fund their courts.
Looking at the WJP Rule of Law Index linked above, it's considering factors like constraints on government powers, absence of corruption, and fundamental rights.
As someone involved in law in the US, the US is really good at these types of things. People, including Americans who have lived here their entire lives, are consistently amazed when they learn the power of the court and how functional it all has managed to be.
That's because, as a consequence of our own transparency, on every thread on a political topic, the resident anarchist trolls are free to give us a history lesson of everything wrong the US has ever done. There are many countries where such types of posters would get arrested on some real or made-up charge for being hyper critical of the state. Most Americans who feel that we're some hyper-corrupt, irreparable place(systemically dysfunctional, if you will) have no idea how far other governments go to cover up their dirty deeds. Our rule of law is still the envy of people who come from places that rule by law.
It seems like you're equating "there is corruption in the US" with "the US has more corruption than most other countries".
I share your concern for corruption in the US, but I submit that you have lost your sense of proportion. The US is not -- by any stretch of the imagination -- anything less than "mostly not corrupt".
Not to mention the fact that for any poor, poorly-ranked nation, it's likely that USA actions there include dropping bombs, assassinating socialist-leaning democratically-elected leadership, stationing troops and/or spooks, encouraging theft of natural resources, funding criminal terrorist anti-state groups, etc.
I believe that the goal is to put pressure on those countries and make investors afraid of placing money there. Of course that a single ranking can't make this, but having multiple indexes + media narrative in this sense can create great leverage for unfair trade deals.
If for example you consider lobbying=corruption (in many countries it is), then the US should indeed be many rankings below.
> "And I can't find a single person on this planet - and I've tried - to replace him."
I’ll do it for $10M/year, paid in advance of course due to the company’s financial situation. Oh, he probably means for whatever meager wages they were paying this guy. Yeah, no wonder.
But he is determined. He says he is good at his job and wants nothing more than to pick up where he left off.
Meanwhile HN commenters be moaning every time their scrollbar is hijacked by a link or they have to deal with spaghetti code at work like "I'm so burned out"
When foreign entities are able to bid for a lot less, and pay a lot less, a lot of it has to do with the fact that they will not bother with 'end of life' for ships, or getting insurance, or worrying about the lives of people who are 'expendable'.
Those very nice buildings in Dubai come from some nasty labour practices.
If every piece of this puzzle from end-to-end were to have happened in a 'rich country' there'd be legal issues, PR/media, litigation, and a separate kind of bureaucracy altogether, meaning the 'alternative' for a lot of corporations is just 'wash their hands' of it, pay 1/2 the price, and get all the ugly parts 'off the books'.
We are to the point now where we have ample material surplus - we don't need any more 'plastic stuff from China' - it'd be worthwhile to start integrating a lot of 'off the books' stuff into trade deals. Ironically, it would be good for 'them' as well, because in chaotic, quasi-lawless systems it doesn't make sense for participants to invest in anything further ahead than what is in front of their noses (i.e. don't hate the Lebanese shippers for doing the only thing they can do to remain profitable, i.e. don't hate the player, hate the game) ... forcing some degree of transparency and accountability in these systems might raise prices a little bit, but the benefits would likely be immensely positive in the system overall.
It's nice that the story is made personal, about a real individual (think: that Tom Hanks film about someone stuck in international airport limbo) but that's not really the story here is it.