Episodes 78 and 79 - Cruise Ships
Today we’re talking ocean liner cruise industry (river cruises are a separate beast).
I have a lot of bummer things to say, so I want to start by sharing the appeal of cruises. If you’ve ever been on a cruise or are dreaming of taking one, I get it.
- It’s an easy vacation, gets you out of town, at often an affordable price especially if you’re a family.
- Unpack once while visiting multiple destinations, with access to food you won’t have to think about and excursions that are easy to join.
- The whole point of a cruise is you can show up, and turn your brain off.
- No matter who you are, there’s a ship for you. Disney cruise lines have floating parks, there are nude cruises, gambling cruises, grand ships and destination ships. On my ship we were at sea half the time, and that works because we had so many amenities it’d be impossible to ever be bored.
- It’s social. It’s so easy to make friends, especially for adults. You’re all in a place where the booze is running and no one has any fucking chores so you chat with other folks who you have at least one thing in common with already and boom, friends.
Why would someone work on a cruise?
- The pay, while low by Canadian standards, is alright depending on where you’re from. $500-1500USD/mo goes a lot farther in the Philippines than it does in Vancouver. Factor in free food, no rent, free medical care, and the wage isn’t so bad. As long as you’re not calculating by the hour loool
- Unless I go back to ships, I probably won’t experience anything like the closeness I felt to my crewmates ever again. I had a BLAST with my crewmates. Each and every one of them was a delightful human being and it’s easy to miss that friendship when you disembark for vacation. I think it’s a big part of what draws folks back when they’ve sworn the last contract was the final one.
- The ports were beautiful.
- Alcohol is super cheap, which is fun at first. There’s a huge party culture, and lots of drinking and sex. But it doesn’t take much for alcohol to turn into a crutch folks use to cope with the stress of cruise life.
I hadn’t had alcohol in over 2 years when I went to ships, and I made it 3 months without drinking. In the last 4 months I drank a LOT.
GENERAL FACTS
There are approximately 300 cruise ships and 55 cruise companies and they carried over 28 million passengers in 2018, up nearly 7% from 2017. They were projected to carry 32 million passengers in 2020.
The average age of a cruiser is 47, the average cruise is 7 days. 49.9% of cruisers are from North America, 25.1% are European, 20% are from Asia-Pacific, 3% are from South America, and 1.7% are listed as “other”.
The cruise industry is dominated by 3 major players; Carnival Corporation has 41% of the market share, Royal Caribbean has 21%, and Norwegian has 13%. They all operate subsidiary cruise lines, which is how they have such a large presence.
Some subsidiaries:
Carnival: Holland America, P&O, Princess
Royal Caribbean: Celebrity, Silversea
Norwegian: Oceania, Regent Seven Seas
Carnival’s profits in 2019 were just about $21bn. That’s some Dr. Evil shit.
Here’s some more information on tax avoidance and cruise line profit margins.
My ship was the Royal Caribbean Oasis of the Seas, and she cost approximately $1.24bn to build in 2006. There are now 5 Oasis class ships that are about the same size. The newest is Wonder of the Seas, which can carry up to 6988 passengers and 2300 crew. It’s 362m long, 18 decks heigh, and weighs nearly 237,000 tonnes.
It has a full size basketball court, an ice skating rink, a zip line, surfing simulator, mini golf, two rock climbing walls, 1400 seat theatre, outdoor aquatic theatre, restaurants, shops, bars, a huge casino, plus pools and eight distinct neighbourhoods. The Central Park neighbourhood has over 10,000 real plants.
It’s setting out on its maiden voyage the day we record, March 4th.
Cruise lines love to talk about how good they are for local economies, but an international research team led a comprehensive review published in 2021 that found “cruising is a major source of environmental pollution and degradation, with air, water, soil, fragile habitats, and wildlife affected.” They also found that “the cruise ship industry is a potential source of physical and mental human health risks, to passengers, staff, and land-based residents who live near ports or work in shipyards… The review combined evidence from more than 200 research papers on health of people and the environment in different oceans and seas around the world.”
Tax Evasion
We’re going to start with Tax Evasion, because it explains a lot of why ships work the way they do.
While Carnival, Royal Caribbean, and Norwegian have their headquarters in Florida, their companies are registered in: Panama, Liberia, and Bermuda.
This means they aren’t beholden to labour laws in the United States, and they don’t have to pay federal taxes. For folks who want to learn more about how this sort of thing works, check out our Tax Justice episode with the fabulous Fariya Mohiuddin.
You may have noticed that ships fly flags that are not from countries that the company is headquartered in or even necessarily registered in. Basically, under international law, all ships must have a flag state, and registering ships with Flag of Convenience (FOC) countries is another way to avoid taxes, keep wages low, and have minimal regulation.
From what I can tell, this practice really started in 1922 when two passenger ships from the USA wanted to serve liquor during prohibition so they transferred the ships to Panama’s registry.
And during the Cold War, the USA registered ships under Liberia to build a “neutral” fleet which, like, surely Russia saw through that?
Countries do sort of benefit financially from this through services, fees, and taxes, but it’s hella dodgy. There are international laws that require countries operating open registries to inspect vessels and investigate accidents and corruption, but FOC countries are notoriously bad at this. Using Panama as an example, they have the largest “fleet” in the world, with over 7000 vessels. Panama’s population is 4.4 million people. Such a tiny country responsible for looking after all those ships is absolutely unfeasible, it would probably cost way more than they’re getting from the industry to inspect every ship thoroughly, and even if they do have the money and manpower, I don’t think it’s a priority. I found a survey of 1500 folks in Panama in 2018/2019 and 15% of respondents said they’d paid a bribe to public or private authorities in the last 12 months. So.
So, cruise lines are not paying taxes in the countries they actually operate, but they’ll be quick to say they pay fees at every port and per-passenger head taxes at ports that require them, which are $2-$15/head. BUT that’s built into the price of the ticket, so passengers are paying that and ships have threatened to boycott ports if they try to raise the fees. This means a port might be receiving less than what it costs to maintain the facilities the cruise lines demand.
The long and short of it is, they pay about 1-2% of their income in taxes in the USA
Whenever there’s a problem at sea and a rescue is needed, whether because a passenger has fallen overboard, or because a fire has broken out on board and the ship is stranded, they call the coast guard for help. The cost of a rescue effort for a passenger overboard can be between $500k and $1m. 14 people on average fall overboard every year. Rescuing a dead ship can be as much as $5m. The ships do not pay the coastguard for these rescue operations, and they don’t send thank-you cards to all the taxpayers of whatever country came to their rescue.
And finally, flags of convenience make investigating crimes super difficult. If a death or assault happens on board and it might make the cruise line look bad, they can just refuse to cooperate with the investigation.
The industry as a whole spent nearly $5m on lobbying last year.
Community Well Being
Port
Ships promise to boost local economies whenever they’re bargaining for new ports, but often they end up cutting deals with local vendors, either creating a model where vendors pay for recommendations to the passengers, or the cruise lines just take a cut. Cruises can take up to 70% of the onshore revenue, which means not only are they not putting money into the system through taxes and fees, they’re keeping passenger spending within their own ecosystem too.
In some cases, they have private ports that keep passengers away from the island’s small businesses and communities and anyone making money in those ports is paying to access that exclusive space. We had a port on my ship’s itinerary that was exactly this; Labadee in Haiti. Disney is attempting to build a private port in the Bahamas in a spot slated for environmental protection and delicate reefs.
Princess had to apologize in 2019 after staff welcomed passengers dressed as “Maori” in grass skirts with black markings on their faces. The ships photographer was there to presumably take photos of passengers to sell later, it’s a bad look.
UNESCO warned Italy if it doesn’t completely divert ships from the Venice lagoon the city will be placed on the endangered list. They were getting 28million visitors a year before 2020.
Crew
Here I can talk a little from personal experience. Most ships must follow the Maritime Labour Convention of 2006 which states you must have at least 10 hours of rest in a 24 hour period, and 77 hours of rest in 7 days. Hours of rest must be no more than two periods and one of them needs to be at least 6 hours. You cannot work more than 14 hours without rest. So basically, you can’t exceed 91 hours of work a week.
Not all countries have signed on to this agreement, but luckily Panama, Liberia, and Bermuda have.
Disclaimer: I have seen firsthand managers pushing staff beyond these limits and having staff lie on their daily time records. So having the standards and ensuring enforcement of those standards can leave quite a gap.
In my first month on board we had to do an inventory, and anyone who’s ever worked retail will know what a nightmare that is, but it’s a special hell on a cruise ship. Normally a shop will do an inventory in a night – bring all the employees in when the shop closes, maybe on a Sunday if you close earlier that day, then work through the night. It’s like that on ships too, but it takes a month because there’s so many shops and so few workers and we have to open up and sell stuff the next day, so recounts are constant and I feel sick just thinking about it. Plus I was doing all my onboard training you do when you first get to the ship. I exceeded 300 hours that month. But normally I’d probably work 250-270 hours a month. 7 days a week, for 7 months straight.
Hours and pay vary wildly depending on your cruise line, ship, and position. Cleaners, food prep, servers are more likely to be working that 300+hour month the whole time, and can make anywhere between $400-$1700/mo.
I was making a $500 base pay, plus commission. Because I was on the biggest ship in the world at the time, commission was pretty good, and I was banking between $1100 and $1800/mo. On smaller ships, you’re more likely to be making that $500. It just depends. I’m not sure what the current base wage is.
In addition to the salary, crew members get a free place to stay, free food, and free medical care. So, depending on your expenses at home, and the exchange rate, you can be making pretty decent money. Or you could be getting totally fleeced. It’s luck of the draw, since you can’t choose what ship you’re sent to. A lot of crew members support family back home.
The work is so demanding it can be an absolute shock to the system to get used to, and a lot of people would probably quit in the first two weeks but ships have worked around this; you pay for your flight to the ship and for your medical examination. My medical examination was $500CAD and my flight was a couple hundred bucks too. Some crew may have also paid an agency to help get a placement. So when you get to the ship you’ve made a pretty big financial bet and you want to stay at least long enough to pay that off, especially if you went into debt to get there. By the time you’ve earned $900 it’s been at least a month and you’ve been love bombed by new friends and grown used to the situation and are ready to join your sea cult.
Crew are chronically over worked and under slept, to the point where your body will do weird things. Your period will act up, your skin will rebel. I lost 20lbs, and not in a good way. That being said, I loved the food. I’ve heard it depends on your ship, and sometimes the food can be awful, but I loved the mess, and they often did special celebrations for holidays, including fancy displays and crepe days.
I was never tricked or misled about what a day on the ship would be like, and no one else I ever spoke to or have read about was either. Cruise lines seem to be more or less upfront about the expectations of the job, but knowing it and experiencing it are very different. And just because I couldn’t find an expose of despicable hiring practices doesn’t mean they don’t exist; I can only speak to my own experience and the research I did. Please correct me if this is an inaccurate representation.
Passengers
You might remember, 100 years ago when the pandemic started? Cruise ships got a lot of attention for having some of the worst outbreaks in the world (looking at you, Diamond Princess with 695/3711 passengers testing positive. 14 deaths).
So yes, ships are basically incubators of disease as people from around the world party in a giant petri dish, but it didn’t have to be as bad as it was.
Ports in the Caribbean were turning ships away in late February 2020 due to reports of flu-like symptoms on board, and ships, instead of quarantining, instead started moving ports around to find those who would accept them, and offering bargain basement deals to passengers, going so far as to lie about the danger of COVID, saying it was a cold-weather illness so booking a Caribbean cruise was a safe bet.
When cruise lines finally stopped sailing, friends of mine were trapped on empty ships for MONTHS because they couldn’t get flights home during the height of the first wave.
Princess’s president Jan Swartz said this:
“We ask you to book a future Princess cruise to your dream destination as a sign of encouragement for our team; as a support to the people, companies, and communities who rely on us; as a vote of our collective faith that we will find solutions to address this virus together; and as a symbol to the world that the things that connect us are stronger than those that divide us.”
Environment
The environmental group Friends of the Earth has a report card for cruise lines based on Sewage Treatment, Air Pollution Reduction, Water Quality Compliance, and Carnival got an F, Royal got a D+, Norwegian got a D-. Only two companies got a passing grade, Silversea Cruises which is a subsidiary of Royal Caribbean, C, and Disney, B-. I was looking at individual ships and hilariously Diamond Princess scored a B-, 6th cleanest ship on the list after 4 Disney ships and a P&O ship.
Dumping
Ships are constantly being caught dumping raw sewage and hazardous waste into the ocean. Bilge water collects in the lowest part of the ship and often contains oil from leaky engines as well as other shit.
The International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL) dictates when and where ships can release comminuted food waste and treated or untreated sewage into the sea. It specifies rules for how such materials must be discharged. But it doesn’t go far enough, mostly stipulating how far from shore you should be before dumping when we shouldn’t be dumping at all.
In 2013 the ship the Caribbean Princess was caught dumping oily waste off the coast of England. The chief engineer and senior first engineer removed the bypass equipment they’d been using to dump and directed subordinates to lie. During the course of the investigation, they found 4 other ships were dumping illegally in a variety of ways, I’ll share the Florida Department of Justice link on it, it’s pretty bad.
In December 2016, Princess Cruise Lines, a subsidiary of a Carnival, pled guilty to seven felony counts related to vessel pollution and efforts to conceal that pollution, one count of conspiracy, four counts of failure to maintain accurate records and two counts of obstruction of justice. The cruise line had to pay a $40 million criminal penalty, the largest ever for deliberate vessel pollution. A five-year term of probation required all ships from eight Carnival cruise lines to participate in a supervised environmental compliance program. The company is required to retain an outside independent third party auditor and to fund a court-appointed monitor. The ship had been dumping illegally since 2005.
In 2019 Carnival Corporation has agreed to pay $20 million after pleading guilty to releasing food and plastic waste into the ocean off the Bahamas. That fine is 0.1% of their profits that year.
In January of 2022, they were fined another $1mil for failing to establish and maintain an independent internal investigative office.
In 2019 Carnival hired their first ever Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer – Peter Anderson, a former federal prosecutor from the US Department of Justice Environmental Crimes Division. His job was to prosecute companies violating environmental regulations. He updated Carnivals Ethics program just months before the pandemic hit.
A cruise ship can generate about 55 litres of hazardous chemical waste every day.
In a week long voyage, the passengers and crew aboard the biggest ships can produce 800,000 litres of sewage and almost 4mil litres of graywater—from sinks, showers, laundry, etc. In a year, 380mil litres of petroleum products from ships seep into the oceans.
To treat sewage and graywater, ships are only required to use Marine Sanitation Devices that often leave behind bacteria, heavy metals, and nutrients that can disrupt marine ecosystems.
I didn’t get the exact numbers on wasted food, but remember how Wonder of the Seas can carry over 9000 people? That’s 30,000 meals a day. Mostly buffet style. And no, they don’t feed leftovers to staff.
Bags of garbage are sometimes caught being thrown overboard, and solid waste is thrown overboard by careless travelers.
Emissions
A ship can burn 425,000 litres of fuel a day, and they’re burning the cheapest shittiest fuel money can buy. For the last half century, most ships have run on heavy fuel oil (HFO), a by-product of crude oil. It’s toxic when burned and hard to clean when spilled. It’s a source of acid rain and respiratory illnesses. In 2005, international legislation regulating air pollution from ships went into effect but ships just started using things called scrubbers to “clean” the smokestacks with a flow of seawater and dump the waste directly into the ocean.
From the WWF:
“Surface seawater is about 30% more acidic than in pre-industrial times, and that may increase by another 120% by the end of the century. That’s before scrubbers are accounted for.”
HFO exhaust washwater is potentially more than 100,000 times more acidic than the seawater it’s dumped into.
“A report recently commissioned by WWF-Canada found that just 30 scrubber-equipped ships were responsible for dumping 35 million tonnes — or the equivalent of 14,000 Olympic swimming pools — of washwater off the coast of British Columbia in 2017.
A recent modelling study suggests that for every ton of sulfur dioxide injected into the ocean by scrubbers, the ocean will not absorb about half a ton of CO2.
This means that not only will the oceans continue to acidify, but that the rate of global climate change could be accelerated if scrubber use continues.”
Some countries have banned discharge from scrubbers, including Brazil, China, Germany, and the US. But not Canada. We could prohibit these things on all three coasts.
The emissions that passengers breath while on a cruise are over 20 times higher than on a busy, polluted roadway, and some readings have shown air quality on par with Delhi on a bad day.
A large cruise ship can have a bigger carbon footprint than 12,000 cars. A cruise has a worse footprint than an airplane, emitting almost DOUBLE the C02. Plus most passengers fly to ships.
Passengers on a 7 day Antarctic cruise can produce as much C02 as the average European does in a year.
Emissions for staying overnight on a cruise are 12 times higher than staying in a regular hotel.
It has been estimated that between 40,000 and 100,000 Britons die prematurely every year as a result of emissions from the shipping and cruise industries
If shipping were a country it would be the globe’s seventh biggest emitter.
Eco-Sensitive Zones
Carnival announced plans to develop the world’s largest cruise port in East Grand Bahama. The facility would be able to accommodate two of their largest ships at the same time. The company is leasing 329 acres of land in an area known as Sharp Rock in East Grand Bahama, which is known as an eco-sensitive zone.
Animal Welfare
As I’m sure you can imagine, none of this is good for animals. Pollution poisons flora and fauna, clouds the water, reduces oxygen levels. Acid conditions mean calcifying animals struggle to grow skeletons and shells. This affects calcifying algae that form the base of the marine food web. Fish expend extra energy to regulate their pH which slows growth, makes them easier prey and more susceptible to disease, and affects reproduction. Acidic conditions can release toxic metals that are normally bound to sediments, which means they’re more likely to end up in the food web and we’re part of the food web.
Noise pollution from ships makes it extremely difficult for marine animals to communicate, especially our big boi mammals like dolphins and whales. It also causes a ton of stress. Imagine 60-90db rolling by you without warning all day every day. Like if your roommate kept vacuuming the house constantly. Only they leave the house dirtier after they’ve finished.
Researchers are finding that whales and dolphins alter their calls when a ship is nearby, using higher frequencies and shorter songs. Whales can take half an hour to start singing again after a ship has left.
If whales can’t hear each other, they group together which makes finding food harder. If they have trouble finding prey, they use up stores of blubber, which contain manmade pollutants that are toxic to whales when released into their systems.
Anyway, reducing speed by 6 knots can decrease ship noise by half.
“Whales are hard to spot on ship navigation. In the last 5 years, 112 whales that washed up dead were identified by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as having injuries consistent with ship collisions. But this doesn’t include whales that never wash ashore. The true number harmed is unknown.”
Solutions
There are solutions to these issues; better recycling programs, cleaner fuel, utilize battery power, run slower to reduce noise and fuel consumption, better onboard incineration. Install closed-loop scrubbers which keeps polluted water stored for treatment on land. They could hold sewage and waste products on board to be treated on land as well. But we need regulations and cruise lines need to retrofit.
Cruise Pollution and health effects
A list of ship pollution and environmental violations and fines (only those reported in the media or public documents)
A good general roundup of cruise pollution
photos of ships in Venice. No wonder they banned them
Scrubber pollution in Puget Sound