Thousands
of maritime employment agencies around the world provide a vital
service, supplying crew members for ships, from small trawlers to giant
container carriers, and handling everything from paychecks to plane
tickets. While many companies operate responsibly, over all the
industry, which has drawn little attention, is poorly regulated. The few
rules on the books do not even apply to fishing ships, where the worst
abuses tend to happen, and enforcement is lax.
Illegal
agencies operate with even greater impunity, sending men to ships
notorious for poor safety and labor records; instructing them to travel
on tourist or transit visas, which exempt them from the protections of
many labor and anti-trafficking laws; and disavowing them if they are
denied pay, injured, killed, abandoned or arrested at sea.
“It’s
lies and cheating on land, then beatings and death at sea, then shame
and debt when these men get home,” said Shelley Thio, a board member of Transient Workers Count Too, a migrant workers’ advocacy group in Singapore. “And the manning agencies are what make it all possible.”
Step
Up Marine Enterprise, the Singapore-based company that recruited Mr.
Andrade and the other villagers, has a well-documented record of
trouble, according to an examination of court records, police reports and case files in Singapore and the Philippines.
In episodes dating back two decades, the company has been tied to
trafficking, severe physical abuse, neglect, deceptive recruitment and
failure to pay hundreds of seafarers in India, Indonesia, Mauritius, the
Philippines and Tanzania.
Still,
its owners have largely escaped accountability. Last year, for example,
prosecutors opened the biggest trafficking case in Cambodian history,
involving more than 1,000 fishermen, but had no jurisdiction to charge
Step Up for recruiting them. In 2001, the Supreme Court of the
Philippines harshly reprimanded Step Up and a partner company in Manila
for systematically duping men, knowingly sending them to abusive
employers and cheating them, but Step Up’s owners faced no penalties.
The
Philippine authorities have charged 11 people tied to Step Up with
trafficking and illegal recruitment of Mr. Andrade and others from the
Philippines. But only one person, allegedly a low-level culprit, has
been arrested and is likely to be tried: Celia Robelo, 46, who faces a
potential life sentence for what prosecutors say was a recruiting effort
that earned her at most $20 in commissions.
Mr.
Andrade’s story was pieced together from interviews with his family,
other seamen recruited in or near his village, police officers, lawyers
and aid workers in Jakarta, Manila and Singapore. It highlights the
tools — debt, trickery, fear, violence, shame and family ties — used to
recruit men, entrap them and leave them at sea, sometimes for years
under harsh conditions.
No
country exports more seafarers than the Philippines, which provides
roughly a quarter of them globally. More than 400,000 Filipinos sought
work last year as officers, deckhands, fishermen, cargo handlers and
cruise workers. Mr. Andrade’s death shows that governments are sometimes
unable or unwilling to protect the rights of citizens far from home.
The
abuse of Filipino seamen has increased in recent years, labor officials
in the Philippines say, because the country’s maritime trade schools
produce, on average, 20,000 graduates a year for fewer than 5,000
openings. As men grow desperate for work, they take greater risks.
Roughly a third of them now use agencies that are illegal — unregistered
and willing to break rules, the officials said.
Such
agencies, favored by ship operators and workers looking to shave costs,
compound the problem of lawlessness on the high seas. Scofflaw ships
cast off stowaways and deplete fishing stocks. Violence is rampant, and
few nations patrol the waters, much less enforce violations of maritime
laws or international pacts.
In
Manila, in late September, along a densely packed two-block stretch of
sidewalk on Kalaw Avenue near the bay, hundreds of seafarers looked for
work. Recruiters from manning agencies — some legal, many not — carried
signs around their necks listing job openings or pointed to brochures
arrayed on tables. Fixers sold fake accreditation papers while a popular
Tagalog rap song, “Seaman Lolo Ko” (“My Grandpa Is a Seaman”), boomed
in the background.
“These
days,” the singer, known as Yongas, rapped, “it’s the seaman getting
duped.” Mariners, who used to be the cheaters (on their spouses), he
warned, are now the ones cheated (by everyone else).
