One thing that ship talks about in its welcome book in the cabin is the diversity of its staff representing hundreds of nations. Our room steward was from South India, our dining stewards were from South America and Asia, and I've seen folks from Thailand, Indonesia, Russia, Bosnians, and Macedonians to count just some from all around the other parts of the ship. I originally thought that the staff was hired among US residents, but it turns out that they were all picked up from agencies in their appropriate countries. They were all extremely cheerful and gracious and sweated bullocks as they ran about cabins and dining rooms. My twelve year old sister even felt empathy for the staff and insisted on cleaning the room and her bed so that the stewards didn't have to do extra work. I developed closer relationships with some of the staff and found out disturbing facts concerning their work load and wages. They work from 6AM to about 10 PM at night (there are others that work at night to service the 24 hour food bars) with a few hours for break. Most of the stewards received a set salary from the cruise liner of, get this, $75 a month. That is $2.50 a day of back breaking work. This is the only stable salary, because the rest of the money they get are from gratuities which vary from cruise to cruise. One steward I talked to told me that the most he got a month was about $1800, which meant that 96% of his income fluctuates. That is the most he could potentially get, but most months, he gets much less than that, usually around $1300. He gets 2 months off during the year to go home and he has to buy his own roundtrip ticket home which costs about $1600. Even his uniform has to be purchased. When he is home, he also has to pay different agencies a few hundreds of dollars just so that he can go back to work on the cruise liner. If you combine all these other expenses, his disposable income likely amounts to less than $1000 a month. He told me that all the stewards are at the mercy of the passengers regardless of the work that they do. Essentially, they are providing free labor, and in my opinion, this walks a very fine line on the border with slave labor.
The stewards are given free room and board and appear to be treated well by the superiors, but the amount of work they do is not compensated well at all. Many of the workers seem to agree that working on this cruise ship yields more income than working in their native country, however, I am disturbed that even though they work on an American cruise liner, they do not receive any protections that American workers typically get including minimum wages and maximum hours worked per day. I don't really know the fine details of all this, but I am going to start looking into what loopholes cruise companies can go through to lower the cost of its laborers.
As in many other cases, boycotting the ships would not be a good idea, because many of these workers do derive their income from this industry and wouldn't have a better outlet otherwise. Nevertheless, I wonder if Congress can pass laws to guarantee protections for these workers and increase the minimum salary for them. I think the American public can afford to pay more to go on these cruise vacations.
