Hats don’t help seafarers – but you can

If you want to help seafarers, don’t patronise them by knitting a hat, Intermanager’s secretary-general (and former seafarer) Kuba Szymanski told the first annual International Maritime Human Rights conference in London this week.

“What would help seafarers? Bring back the dignity of being a seafarer,” Szymanski said.

“What would we help seafarers? Stop criminalising us.”

I was in the audience, live-tweeting Szymanski’s comments, and suddenly my Twitter feed was ablaze with approbation for his words – much of which came from seafarers themselves.

“A qualified master earns more than a British Airways pilot,” Szymanski said, acknowledging that the ‘knit a hat’ charity campaign had its “heart in the right place”. But it’s not like seafarers are living in a gulag (unless they’ve been abandoned, of course – which is happening more and more often in these financially straitened times).

So how can we restore the dignity of being a seafarer?

A couple of years ago, veteran maritime journalist Richard Clayton wrote a brilliant column that said that by working in the shipping industry, we must all become its PR agents if we want to increase its visibility.

If you’re at dinner with someone who’s unfamiliar with the fact that shipping brings us 90% of everything, tell them.

Tell them that shipping was the first industry to agree a global carbon dioxide reduction strategy. Make them as proud of our industry as we are.

But most importantly, you need to tell your friends and family about seafarers. The bananas you are eating in the west were grown thousands of miles away and brought here thanks to our seafaring friends (you can say). The steel in the cutlery you are using was probably milled in China using iron ore from Australia or Brazil, imported with the help of – guess who.

Seafaring is a tough job, even when the working conditions are good (you can tell your friends). Seafarers spend long periods of time away from their families with poor access to communications. They may feel compelled to spend more time working away in order to make more money for those at home.

Seafarers also have an increased likelihood of developing mental illness – and the suicide rate is high. A 2012 study showed that of the 17,026 seafarer deaths between 1960 and 2009, some 1,011 seafarers died as a result of suicide (5.9%). Compared to deaths of 4,487 seafarers due to illness, 590 seafarers died as a result of suicide (13.1%).

These percentages would be higher if 50% of deaths due to seafarers disappearing at sea were included, the study said.

Sometimes seafarers do not receive their wages at all and may even be abandoned by their owners and managers. They may be forced to live onboard their vessel for many months, often surviving on donations from local missions – like the crew of the Five Stars Fujian in August.

People need to know about all this. They need to become as familiar with this problem as Western consumers are with the plight of coffee and cocoa bean farmers in developing countries, thanks to the Fair Trade movement. Once there was widespread understanding among consumers that corporations were basically naming their price for produce and cheating farmers out of a fair cut, the Fair Trade campaign fundamentally shifted the marketplace because it shifted consumer demand to ensure that producers were paid fairly.

Perhaps we can invent Fair Trade Shipping. Questions were raised at the conference as to how shippers can ensure that crews are treated fairly onboard the vessels that carry their goods. David Hammond, founder of Human Rights At Sea, hinted that his organisation is working on a scheme that would help do just that.

In the meantime, you and I can be doing the groundwork in getting the word out as to why seafarer welfare matters to the world. By doing this, we can make any mainstream campaign on seafarer welfare instantly more effective.

As a journalist, I’d also implore you to kick up a stink if you know of seafarers being abandoned or treated badly. Send us photos (preferably ones that can be verified, such as with this ingenious app), put us in touch with eyewitnesses and those who can corroborate your story. (Hell, give me the phone number of the shipping company’s CEO – I’ll ring him up!)

The press has a vital role to play in all this too – help us ensure we can do it accurately and effectively and we can help build the case as to why there’s still work to be done on seafarer welfare.

We can restore the dignity of being a seafarer by making them into real people who exist in our lives and who are around us all the time. We need to build a sense of gratitude among the general public for the sacrifices seafarers make in their personal lives in order to bring us goods.

No more knitted hats.

Speaking of ethical coffee, the Sailors’ Society has launched By Sea ground coffee, from which 100% of profits go to the charity. Buy some for your office here.