The Forgotten Workers
By 
Of all the workers dealing with their own private hells during the pandemic, none have it worse than sailors stuck at sea.
Ralph Santillan, a merchant seaman from the Philippines, hasn’t had shore leave in half a year. It has been 18 months since he reported for duty on his ship, which hauls corn, barley and other commodities around the world. It has been even longer since he saw his wife and son.
“There’s nothing I can do,” Mr. Santillan said late last month from his ship, a 965-foot bulk carrier off South Korea. “I have to leave to God whatever might happen here.”
His time on the ship, where he spends long days chipping rust off the deck or cleaning out cargo holds, was supposed to have ended in February, after an 11-month stint — the maximum length for a seafarer’s contract.
But the Covid-19 pandemic led countries to start closing borders and refusing to let sailors come ashore. For cargo ships around the world, the process known as crew change, in which seamen like Mr. Santillan are replaced by new ones as their contracts expire, ground nearly to a halt.
In June, the United Nations called the situation a “growing humanitarian and safety crisis.” And there is still no solution in sight.
Last month, the International Transport Workers’ Federation, a seafarers’ union, estimated that 300,000 of the 1.2 million crew members at sea were essentially stranded on their ships, working past the expiration of their original contracts and fighting isolation, uncertainty and fatigue.
The global seafaring labor force is one that almost no one thinks about. But it’s a lot of people, usually from poor nations, with few options. It’s a hard, lonely job. And because these workers have so little power, they are easily placed into terrible situations, even when something less severe than a global pandemic arrives. It’s unacceptable and should be at the top of the global labor rights agenda.