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  • This shit is extremely weird and happens all over. For some reason sailors are just absolutely not allowed off their shitty falling apart ships and have to stay on board even after the owners vanish and leave them hanging in the wind. There are sailors trapped in this situation in ports all over the world - the ships are too damaged to sail, or the owners vanished without paying port fees and the ship is impounded, or whatever. Weird shit. And all these sailors, mostly from global south countries, are trapped. The country they're stuck in won't let them off the ship, they have no way to pay for port fees or fuel and sometimes even food or water. It's utterly fucking bizarre.

    I don't think it's a large number of ships in absolute terms, but it is common in the sense that at least a few ships are trapped in this limbo all the time. There's this whole world of ultra-shady shipping with ships that are registered in sketchy tax haven countries, or have no registration, and they get abandoned all the time. And sailors in general just get treated like shit. A lot of sailors come from poor global south countries and get treated as disposable. Terrible conditions, bad or no support from the ship owners, if something goes wrong they can be stranded and totally fucked. It's a mess, like a serious problem for workers.

  • the FBI still has their seized phones and shit, so not only are they stuck on a damaged ship they might be unable to reach out to family and friends (not sure what the communication/internet situation is on a ship like that).

  • If you think this is wild you should read some stories about stowaways. I know a guy who sailed with a dude who had been a stowaway on danish ships for a couple decades, and that was a nice story. A lot of the stowaways get tortured and/or killed and then dumped in international waters. A stowaway is any person who is not on the ships' manifest. Lot of refugees that just... disappear.
    Stowaways can be made to work while they're on your ship, though you have to provide them lodgings and food. There's a lot of people who get found on ships, are made to work and then are unable to leave the ship because no country will take them. Then they're just stuck there forever.

    • this is a great addendum to the other comments about the regularity of this: it's not entirely racism or from the 'host' country, the ship owners also don't want their labor force escaping from phenomenally oppressive and dangerous conditions that exist on board. you let sailors off in port you traditionally lose some, and in neoliberal cost-cutting environments it's even more essential to retain labor now as there's less surplus replacements available.

      • Passports stay in the captain's safe.

      • Company owners aren't really afraid of that. By law all sailors are allowed to cancel their contract at any time, after which they have to be left in the nearest port. Stowaways aren't covered by this because they're not hired as sailors. They're not hired at all. The labour they can do is usually menial due to a mix of factors - They won't have the technical know-how to do a lot of advanced stuff, they might have difficulty communicating, there's trust issues and a ship is already crewed to fulfill the tasks it needs to do - Though always as sparsely as possible. This means if there's suddenly an extra set of hands they'll mainly be cooking and cleaning, which is essential, but there's already people doing that, so the cooking and cleaning will just be better, which is nice, but capitalists don't care about that.

        Even if the free labour a stowaway provides was skilled it's not really common enough for this to be something the company owners rely on or even care about (in terms of labor costs). Even if it were common the company owners would still hate stowaways because they are an expense for every ship they're on, even if they're made to work for free. There's an incredible amount of paperwork attached to having a stowaway, and a lot of places won't even let you dock if you have one. Suddenly your cargoship can't gain access to a habour, it can't unload, it can't reload, your profits are fucked, all because you wanted to keep an indentured servant on board. You can't kick them off the ship either, because now they're registered as being on your ship, so if they suddenly disappear people are going to ask questions. Now if the stowaway had disappeared before anyone had reported a stowaway?.. Well then that's just the cost of doing business. But once they're registered you're on the hook.

        Countries won't let your ship dock because they're afraid the filthy undocumented person on board (who is almost assuredly from some horrible third world country yuck!) might leave the ship and go into the sea.
        Capitalists hate stowaways because they cost them money. Sailors dislike the hassle that's attached to having a stowaway. The hassle is bureaucracy. The bureaucracy is because people are afraid of undocumented immigrants. This is because of racism.

        All the "making the stowaway work" is more something that kind of springs from the crew. You've got this guy on board, he's been on board for a few months. He might as well chip in a bit, right? He can do the laundry or whatever.

        That's what I know about the stowaway culture, but I'm mainly drawing on anecdotes from Scandinavian ships, though all ships have pretty international crews, so I wouldn't be surprised if that's not just standard procedure almost everywhere. Cruise ships excluded.

  • Behold the naked depravity of a state subservient to capital, observe the rules-based cruelty and recoil in horror

  • a barge crashed into a bridge and you’re worried about the expense of a motel 6?

    This line goes hard

    • Yo I'm from Baltimore originally, they don't even need a motel 6. There's aid groups for sailors who get stuck in the port for a while (happens semi frequently if a ship has mechanical problems or something). They had like small kitchens to make food, vans to take people places and I'm pretty sure they even gave some small bunk houses at their disposal.

  • One thing that really sucks about these sorts of things is they highlight the USA's desperate need for investing in public infrastructures but at the same time demonize the idea of public works/goods/services like roads, bridges, ports. It really shows how utterly hallow the skulls of most media class is.

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