Carnival Cruise: Sweatshops at Sea

From Corpwatch:

Carnival Cruise staff on UK ships are paid $1.20 (75p) an hour in basic wages, according to new documents seen by the Guardian newspaper. Moreover, P&O Cruises withhold passengers' tips unless crew hit performance targets which work out to roughly 15% of wages, unless they get at least a 92% favorable rating from customers.

These wages are below the minimum level recommended by the Joint Maritime Commission of the International Labour Organization which was set at US $555 a month for salaries paid out after January 1, 2012.

“Unfortunately, because the shipping industry is largely unregulated, (workers) wages will normally depend on the kind of contract (they) have signed,” notes the International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF) web page for seafarers.

The $1.20 an hour wages are for staff on P&O Cruises sailing out of Southampton in the UK. The tour operator began life as Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Company which operated the world's first passenger ships starting in 1822 with trips to Iberian Peninsula, and tours in 1844. The UK company merged with Carnival Corporation of Florida in 2003 to create the world’s largest cruise ship operator with annual revenues of $15.8 billion in 2011 and profits of $2.2 billion.

Today most of the workers aboard P&O are from India and the Philippines. Tours in July advertised on the site for the Carnival Legend range between $2,798 and $6,458 per passenger for a 12 day trip around northern Europe. A quick calculation suggests that P&O workers would need to work for almost 500 days to pay for a cruise themselves, assuming that they did not spend a single penny of their wages.

David Dingle, CEO of Carnival UK, told the Guardian that staff were "much happier" and many of them earned over £1,000 a month ($1,600). Some passengers were skeptical. One - Rob Bygrave of Sherborne, Dorset - told the newspaper that "grown men were in tears" after hearing about the new pay scheme.

"It's high time the disgraceful practice of allowing the shipping industry to pay poverty wages to workers who don't live in the UK was stopped,” Brendan Barber, general secretary of the Trade Union Congress told the Guardian. “Exploitative rates of pay for those working on British ships have no place in a modern society."

An estimated 1.2 million people work at sea. For them working on board a ship has never been an idyllic operation. Over 200 years after the men of the HMS Bounty rebelled against their captain for mistreatment (commemorated in a number of books and films like Mutiny on the Bounty) activists say that the ship workers are still exploited routinely.

“It’s a sweatshop at sea,” says Paul Chapman, former port chaplain, founder of the Center for Seafarers' Rights, and author of “Trouble on Board: The Plight of International Seafarers.” “A ship owner can go any place in the world, pick up anybody he wants, on almost any terms. If the owner wants to maximize profit at the expense of people, it’s a piece of cake.”

“Cruise ships maintain a degree of glamour and opulence. Advertising projects images of fun and carefree times. Those of us living in port cities see impressively clean, bright and huge ships glide into our harbours, offloading passengers anxious to spend money at stores, restaurants, and with tour operators,” writes Professor Ross A. Klein of Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada who runs http://www.cruisejunkie.com/.

In an article titled “High Seas, Low Pay, Klein adds:

“The reality for many cruise-ship workers, however, is certainly not carefree, nor fun. While the working conditions for officers, cruise staff, and those working in the shops and casinos are adequate, if not good, the experience of those working in the dining room, cleaning rooms, in the galley, and below deck is quite different. These workers are often paid substandard wages, have marginal accommodations, survive on inadequate food, and live under a system that is rife with abuse and uncertainty.”

The ITF has been fighting to get European countries to adopt the Maritime Labour Convention that would require ships to maintain minimum labor standards on board ships. The UK is yet to ratify the convention.

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Class Warfare 101: Preach What You Leech.

The greatest irony in the world is that as much as the understanding of what it takes to sustain health has advanced, the health of the population has not improved. In fact, if anything, the health of our population is worse than ever.

Turn on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, etc. and, within a few minutes of watching, you're bound to see health segments preaching the value of fruits and vegetables, getting enough exercise, and the importance of eliminating processed foods, to maintaining our health. In the meantime, the hegemonic and political forces lurking behind the scenes of United States, Inc. are doing their very best to continue the mass production processes developed to provide cheap food to concentrated working-class, urban populations who have became dependent on this cheap food for their nutritional sustenance. Not to mention, the rising cost of food, and medical care, Monsanto's harvest of fear, and the elimination of jobs that has taken place over the last three to four decades.

A study published in the November 2009 issue of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine showed that 50% of all U.S. children will be on food stamps at some point in their childhood, and a startling 90% of Black children will be.

Now, more and more struggling working-class families - due to the downturn in our economy, and rising food prices - are having to sacrifice nutritional value in order to stay afloat. Although this report is from the UK, to be sure, especially considering the outrageous medical expenses we Americans have, the situation here is the same, if not worse.

Here's the thing. According to this report, fruit and vegetable consumption amongst the bottom 10% has fallen 30% in four years. 30% over forty years would've been bad enough, but four years! That, my friends, should be a wake up call for everyone.

Leeches, they preach to us. Why? Simple. Indoctrinate us to believe it's our fault when our health fails, our neighbor's fault when their health fails. Keep our nation divided against itself...keep us in-fighting in order to distract us as they leech from us what they preach to us.

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What does Labor Want?

As the nation pays tribute to the American worker, the American worker is finding it harder and harder to keep, find or create work enough to support a family. It's not that there is no work to be done.  Quite the contrary. The amount of work to be done is endless.  No, the problem is priorities.

Rather than focusing on what's best for society, we've channeled most of our productive effort into the making and accumulation of money at the expense of pretty much everything else.

"What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures." ~ Samuel Gompers

US Department of Labor.

The Stimulus Package (HR1) and Low-Income Families - "A third of all families with children, 13.4 million families with children, are low-income, defined as families with incomes less than twice the federal poverty line. Nearly three-quarters of these families have at least one employed adult, though not all are working full-time. Over 60% of the working adults have a high school education or less. How we address these labor-market problems will help determine the inequality in our country and the prospects for future generations." 

Low-Income Working Families: Updated Facts and Figures

• Low-income parents work a lot. Even though low-income families worked substantially less than higher-income families in 2006, nearly half (48.6%) fell in the high-intensity category—meaning at least one parent worked full time, all year. Another 17.8% worked a moderate amount, 5.6% worked a low amount, and 8.2% worked for themselves.

• Low wages explain why these families have low incomes. The vast majority of low-income families’ income comes from earnings—89% in the case of low-income families with at least one full-time, full-year worker in 2006. These high-work families made roughly $25,000 during 2006 (only 22% above the poverty level for a family of four). Those in the medium– and low–work intensity categories had even lower incomes, roughly $13,860 and $6,300, respectively.

• Single-parent families are in even worse economic situations. Single-parent families are almost twice as likely to have low incomes compared to all families with children, and almost three times as likely to have low incomes compared to married-couple families with children. 70% of single parents are in the workforce, but only about 40% work full time—perhaps because of child care challenges and other family responsibilities. When they are able to work, low-income single parents work for lower wages; in 2006, single parents earned about $10 an hour while married parents earned about $11 an hour. The median wage rates for each group are about $1 lower.

• Low-income families have low rates of health insurance coverage. The share of non-elderly adults in low-income households who lacked health insurance increased from 39 to 43% from 2000 to 2005; for children, nearly 15% remained uninsured at the end of this period. The rate of uninsurance for low-income children actually declined relative to the beginning of the decade, but only due to an increase in public insurance programs that focus on children, such as the State Children’s Health Insurance Program,. During this period, the percentage of low-income families with employer-sponsored insurance dropped significantly. For families with poverty-level incomes (below 100% of poverty), the percentage with coverage dropped nearly 7 percentage points, from 37 to 30%. For those with incomes between 100 and 200% of the FPL, private coverage dropped a similar amount, from 59 to 52%. For comparison, coverage rates for the highest-income families (with incomes above 400% of the FPL) dropped as well, but only 0.7%, for a 2005 coverage rate of 92%.

• Health problems are more prevalent among low-income families, and these families are more likely to be uninsured. Almost 21% of families with income below 150% of the federal poverty level have at least one member in fair or poor health, compared with only 16.7% of higher-income families. Lower-income families are also much more likely to have at least one member without health insurance.

• Finding decent affordable housing is a huge problem for low-income families. The hourly wages needed to afford housing at fair-market prices are well above the wages low-income workers receive. Average rents nationwide have been growing faster than inflation, while the median renter’s monthly income dropped 7.3% between 2000 and 2008. As a result, average gross rents (monthly rent plus the estimated average cost of utilities) as a share of renter income increased from 26.5 to 30.3% over the period

• While the heads of low-income working families are likely to be less educated than those of middle-income families, the large majority have at least a high school diploma. Of the heads of low-income working families, 73% have at least a high school education; 35% have education beyond high school.

• Compared with high- and middle-income families, low-income working families are disproportionately nonwhite and immigrant, although most are headed by white, native-born, non-Hispanic adults. Forty-two% of low-income working families are headed by white adults, while 70% of middle- and high-income families are headed by white adults. Seventy-three% of low-income working families are headed by native-born adults, compared with 85% of middle- and high-income families.

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In Honor of Labor Day

Robert Reich argues our nation of citizens has transformed into a nation of powerful consumers and investors driving our country's focus on securing, protecting and maintaining the integrity of our labor force out.

“You and I are complicit. Our “great deals” are somebody else’s lower pay and some corporation’s lobbying."

Consumers, many times thwart the effort of corporations to "do the right thing" by refusing to pay the additional cost required to make "the right thing" work. Reich points out consumers will choose to save a penny rather than contribute to a worthy cause citing the "dolphin-safe" canned tuna example.

“Consumers wanted a dolphin-safe product,” but “if there was a dolphin-safe can of tuna next to a regular can, people chose the cheaper product. Even if the difference was a penny.” -- J. W. Connolly, former president of Heinz, parent company of Star-Kist,

Star-kist scrapped its effort to protect dolphins because consumers were not willing to spend an extra penny.

With the advent of the internet and other new technology, newly empowered consumers tipped the scale in their direction, all of a sudden making American businesses cater to consumers to give them what they want, lower prices...and they got it, Wal-Mart being one example.

According to Reich, Wal-Mart gave into consumer demand, and took the necessary steps to ensure its consumers get lower prices. Unfortunately, lower prices come with a huge price and that is forfeiture of the rights and protection of labor.

I admit I used to be the first one to seek out lower prices and consume as much as I can thinking I had scored big-time, but not so much in the last couple of years. I finall realized most of the "stuff" I had accumulated occupied precious space for absolutely no reason other than to make the the "stuff" I do have use for unusable because I needed a GPS system to locate it, whether it be a can of tuna, my favorite shirt, can-opener or the remote control.

Maybe, Wal-Mart's not so bad after all, or "we the people" are not so innocent.

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Gendered Division of Labor Gave Modern Humans Advantage Over Neanderthals

Diversified social roles for men, women, and children may have given Homo sapiens an advantage over Neanderthals, says a new study in the December 2006 issue of Current Anthropology. The study argues that division of economic labor by sex and age emerged relatively recently in human evolutionary history and facilitated the spread of modern humans throughout Eurasia.

"The competitive advantage enjoyed by modern humans came not just from new weapons and devices but from the ways in which their economic lives were organized around the advantages of cooperation and complementary subsistence roles for men, women, and children," write Steven L. Kuhn and Mary C. Stiner (University of Arizona).

Kuhn and Stiner note that the rich archaeological record for Neanderthal diets provides little direct evidence for a reliance on subsistence foods, such as milling stones to grind nuts and seeds. Instead, Neanderthals depended on large game, a high-stakes resource, to fuel their massive body mass and high caloric intake. This lack of food diversity and the presence of healed fractures on Neanderthal skeletons--attesting to a rough-and-tumble lifestyle--suggest that female and juvenile Neanderthals participated actively in the hunt by serving as game drivers, beating bushes or cutting off escape routes.

The Middle Paleolithic Neanderthal record also lacks the artifacts commonly used to make weather-resistant clothing or artificial shelters, such as bone needles. Thus, it was the emergence of "female" roles -- subsistence and skill-intensive craft -- that allowed H. sapiens in ecologically diverse tropical and sub-tropical regions to take advantage of other foods and live at higher population densities.

"Earlier hominins pursued more narrowly focused economies, with women's activities more closely aligned with those of men with respect to schedule and ranging patterns," write the authors. "It is impossible to argue that [Neanderthal] females and juveniles were fulfilling the same roles--or even an equally diverse suite of economic roles--as females and juveniles in recent hunter-gatherer groups," they add.

While some degree of niche specialization between adult male and females is documented for many large-mammal species, recent humans are remarkable for cooperative economies that combine pervasive sharing and complementary roles for individuals of different ages and sexes.

Sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Current Anthropology is a transnational journal devoted to research on humankind, encompassing the full range of anthropological scholarship on human cultures and on the human and other primate species. Communicating across the subfields, the journal features papers in a wide variety of areas, including social, cultural, and physical anthropology as well as ethnology and ethnohistory, archaeology and prehistory, folklore, and linguistics.

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