Despite risks, Filipino seafarers continue to toil in the high seas

(First of two parts)

Most of the 2,100 passengers of the luxury cruise ship SS Norway were probably still asleep when it docked in Miami in the wee hours of the morning of May 25, after a week-long cruise in the Caribbean.

But Ricardo Rosal, newly promoted as the famed cruise ship’s third engineer, was already at work, along with the rest of the crew. The first Filipino to be elevated to that rank in the Norway, Rosal, 51, had toiled for years as one of the ship’s boiler-room stokers. His rise in rank had meant a salary that was almost twice his $500-monthly wage.

Rosal was with the stokers when the boiler suddenly exploded that morning, waking many of the passengers. He and three other crew members were killed instantly, their bodies charred by the violent rush of high-pressure, superheated steam. No passenger was hurt, but several other crew members were seriously injured, with four more dying days later.

Today, almost two months later, Rosal’s wife, Maria Gracia, has yet to accept the fact that the father of her three children is dead. But seasoned seafarers just grit their teeth, knowing that the shipping industry is among the most dangerous in the world.

Despite a safety-conscious regime instituted over the years by the International Maritime Organization (IMO), maritime disasters such as that of SS Norway’s boiler room explosion continue to happen. The Philippines is the world’s top supplier of seafarers and one in every five seamen onboard international ocean-going vessels is Filipino. For this reason, the chances of having Filipinos among the casualties in any major maritime disaster are high.

In the SS Norway explosion, which is regarded as the most fatal cruise-ship accident in the United States in over a decade, seven of the eight who died were Filipinos, as were 14 of the injured, most of them suffering from burns.

Last month, four Filipino mariners also lost their lives in an explosion aboard the Maltese-flagged tanker Efxinos, off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, while two others were injured.

Yet such tragedies have not daunted Filipino seafarers, who are eager to work overseas. The domestic shipping industry certainly cannot absorb them, and it pays far lower than what they can earn abroad. The government is also encouraging the brawn drain, not least because seafarers remit back to the Philippines some $1 billion every year.

Unfortunately, Filipinos are losing their competitiveness in today’s demand-driven global labor market. In the last few years, international ships have begun recruiting more seafarers from China and Eastern Europe. According to industry insiders, these mariners are relatively at par with Filipinos in terms of skills, but accept lower wages.

"We’re just one of the many labor-supplying countries," says Ramon Tionloc Jr. a center director at the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA). "In the 1980s, we used to experience double-digit growth rates in the deployment of sea-based workers. It has shrunk since then. We need to sustain our growth considering that the Chinese have been very strong in the last two years."

Long before the advent of the country’s overseas labor program, ships sailing international waters already had Filipino seafarers onboard. Between 1975 and 1999, the seafaring work force increased eight times, credited largely to manning agencies that were able to market the skills of Filipino mariners.

There are some 500,000 registered Filipino seafarers but only 200,000 of them can find work onboard international ocean-going vessels at any one time. The growth in seafarer deployment has also plummeted in the last two years. Some studies say this could be an indication that the Philippine ship-manning industry may have already reached a plateau.

Most industry insiders agree that the government has been hard at work trying to stave off the decline. In the process, however, local seafarers are being asked to trade off some benefits so they would remain globally competitive.

The most recent POEA standard employment contract for seafarers onboard ocean-going vessels, which covers those deployed from June 2002 onwards, is seen by some seafarer groups as a sellout.

Lawyer Edwin dela Cruz, president of the International Seafarers Action Center (ISAC), says the contract only shows that the government regards seafarers as a commodity "whose entitlements need to be diminished so they can be marketable."

Under the old contract, deaths or injuries need only to occur during the seafarer’s employment, which begins at the time of his or her departure from the airport or seaport in the point of hire and ends upon his or her return to the said port when the contract ends. As long as this was the case, few employers would even bother to ask about the circumstances of deaths or injuries. Claim payments were automatically remitted in two to three months.

Today the burden of proving that a death or injury is work related has been shifted to seafarers, who are at a disadvantage as they and their families do not have access to documents to prove their claims. Giehrjem Puracan, a lawyer pursuing seafarers’ claims, says, "The records are, in most cases, in the hands of the ship owners."

(To be continued)