He points out that if a shipowner wants to sleep well at night and not worry about what on earth might be happening to his ship, it is attention to the human element that will provide this satisfying slumber.

He suggests that changes are needed to the way that seafarers are regarded by their employers, and that treating them as casual labour, as they were a century ago and more, is self defeating.  His words sort of resonate with those of the IMO Secretary-General Efthimios Mitropoulos, as he officially commemorated the start of the “Year of the Seafarer” at IMO this week.

Why have we taken so long to make the connection between our labour problems and the way many seafarers are treated? It cannot be because of a lack of warning. Years ago I listened to some industry seer pointing out that it was madness on stilts for a shipowner to put a ship, with all its attendant liabilities, in the hands of people he had never met, possibly hired through the agency of a third party on the other side of the world, that he knew very little about either.

The answer, of course, is because much industry manpower has always been treated like a commodity, acquired on the cheap and dispensed with at the end of the voyage without a second thought. It wasn’t a particularly brilliant idea in the days of sailing ships, although seafarers were flexible folk who could handle any type of ship. Today, with specialist tonnage, full of complicated machinery and those liabilities increased a hundred-fold, one might think that attitudes to the hiring of seagoing labour ought to be adjusted accordingly.

Robert Ferguson concludes his comment by demanding “new thinking” on the human element, lest the industry merely “stagnate”. Why is this so difficult? And will the Maritime Labour Convention make any difference at all, if attitudes around the employment of seafarers do not change?