Hot take on wifi cold spots

‘Is it ignorance, arrogance, a lack of empathy, perhaps all combined with a psychotic approach to profit maximisation?’ Steven Jones, founder of the Seafarers Happiness Index, reacts to news that as much as 13% of the global merchant fleet still gives crew no access to the internet.

When ships are good, they are very good indeed, but when they are bad are horrid. That seems to be the loud and sadly unsurprising message from Idwal’s new ESG social impact report.

This insightful tyre kicking exercise highlights the incredibly wide, perhaps even widening gap, between those doing things well, those who are at least trying and those who seemingly quite frankly couldn’t care less.

Why though, what is to be gained by being off the grid? Perhaps these are owners who eschew all modernity, kicking back against the modern world, their ships in aspic, frozen in time. Take that 21st Century, they wave in semaphore. More likely they just shrug.

It seems incredible that so many seafarers have to live and work in an internet cold-spot. Even more so when the good shipowners are so united in their vocal support for the good that comes with the modern operational environment.

There has long been, and likely always will be, a natural strata and order in the industry. The owners who know the costs but also the value of every part of their operations, who know that they can save and earn through being leaders when it comes to technology, to transparency, to operating sustainably in all senses.

Seafarers want to be connected, they want to have a sense of certainty about when they can get online, how much it will cost and to have fast, high-quality links back to home, to the world.

To identify such a large proportion across some 13,000 ships who have none of that should be really jarring and shocking. It should make us feel angry, to think that there are so many seafarers denied as normal a life as possible. We cannot change the reality of seagoing, you have to leave, to drop over the horizon and go where the tide and trade take you. You do not, however, have to do it ripped from civilisation, isolated and apart.

In the upcoming Seafarers Happiness Index report there was a phrase which one respondent used, probably from one of the 13 percenters, they commented on the challenges of life at sea, saying the best that he and his shipmates can hope for is that while they often feel alone, at least they are “alone together”.

Which is as poetic as it is heart wrenching. Until you think further and ask why so many seafarers have to put up with this. Why is life being made harder than it needs to be? Is it ignorance, arrogance, a lack of empathy, perhaps all combined with a psychotic approach to profit maximisation?

Whatever the driver, it is the symptomatic tip of a terrible iceberg. We are doing many great things in shipping, but there remain far too many bad actors still allowed to ply their trade across the seas. While the good owners and ships are tied up with red tape and face crises from Red Sea to dried canals, the bad plough on seemingly unfettered by having to do anything approaching the right thing.

These are the dark corners. The parts of the industry where abandonment of seafarers feels a reasonable action. Where poor food, lack of drinking water, and old lumpy bad mattresses add to the everyday sense of relentless misery for the crews unfortunate enough to answer the wrong dodgy Gmail recruiter.

We can do better, and many good companies do. However, while the number of vessels which do not allow seafarers the right to be connected outweigh the percentage which have unlimited access, then we clearly still have work to do. It is time for a change, and it should be hoped that the capability to apply a social sense check to the ways in which ships go about their business, then we can build a better, brighter reality for life at sea. We can see the impact of doing good reflected in the market value of the vessel, and that has to be progress.