This is not from outsourcing, this is Kafkaesque bureaucracy created by Egypt itself.
All of that being said, I agree an American company likely would have had this sorted out faster, because the USA tends to deal with bankruptcies and the like very quickly.
I assume it's not always the most sound way to do business but some should get away with it.
Let's assume that logistics organisations consistently run out of resources. That this is a probabalistic outcome of operations. The BBC article even gives us a sense of the baseline risk, about 250 cases presently, and 85 new ones reported in 2020 (meaning that typical durations exceed a year in length).
In that case, how do you address the inevitable circumstance without creating a human rights abuse crisis, presuming sufficient consideration and political will exists for this to occur?
Elsewhere in the thread, surity bonds are mentioned. That is, a ship on entering a port or other navigational / marine facility, places a bond in which some large and far more solvent entity assures that compensation where due is paid.
International treaties (to which major transit points such as canals might be obligated to join) are another option.
An international response organisation with the ability to both intervene and impose additional sanctions on any entities which impose such sailor-arrest.
Keep in mind that the 2020 Beruit ANFO explosion occurred after a not-dissimilar situation, in which a ship was deemed unseaworthy and its cargo seized and held under exceptionally (and ultimately massively fatal and damaging) conditions, in part because its ownership and questions over compensation were not met.
(There were quite admittedly other concerns and failures, including by the Beruit port authority and judiciary, but the ownership and payment aspects touched on most of these. Hazardous cargo and storage have been at the heart of several other recent major disasters, including in Tianjin, China.)
Whilst "flag of convenience" regulations make race-to-the-bottom standards in shipping regulation common, obligations to maintain surity bonds or similar instruments of substantial duration (e.g., a year or more) to access major ports, canals, fueling depots, and the like, could help ensure compliance.
Well, they occasionally say they don’t (and Roddenberry said they don’t), but they actually do (or discussing the fact that they do) in every single one of the series, and several of the movies.
> and it’s post-scarcity so they don’t run out of resources.
They do run into resource limits.
Also, the UFP is, you known, fiction, and not even haed science fiction (or even particularly internally consistent fiction.)
we're headed away from UFP and more towards DOOP.
This isn’t the result of big massive conglomerates. It’s mom and pop small firms.
People to small and broke to sue.
This legal fiction is only true as long as it is allowed to be. Egypt can see who was operating and using the ship and block their other ships until they fix the issue - they don't need to hold a scapegoat hostage for years.
So absolute upper bound for losses is $180 million. If I were making odds I would guess that only 1/3 of the ships diverted around Africa, so $30 million, and that the rescue cost another $15 million, so over/under $45 million.
And that's without even bringing up that there was a canal pilot on the ship at the time who may share some portion of the responsibility for the accident. So, yeah, it's extortion.
More likely: Ships are required by rules to have an Egyptian pilot on-board during the passage, and there is limited legal liability for ordinary operating circumstances. That said, if an Egyptian pilot was found grossly negligent of their duties, then they would be liable. However, in most legal systems, this is an exceptionally high bar. And, I assume if you pass the canal, you subject yourself to the Egyptian court system. (Read about the big cruise ship that ran aground in Italy. That story reads like text book gross negligence!)
“(7) Owners, mobilizers, charterers and/or operators bind themselves responsible for any mistakes resulting from pilot’s advice or arrise by SCA personnel.”
https://www.suezcanal.gov.eg/English/Navigation/Pages/Ruleso...
The same applies here: yes, Egypt is corrupt. Yes, this is a massive violation of human rights. But the company took on a moral responsibility when it sent out that crew. We can't excuse someone from their ethical duty simply because other people neglect theirs. Ethics is meaningless if it stops applying as soon as there's corruption outside.
> TransAm appealed, but in a 2-to-1 decision, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed the Board’s reinstatement order (TransAm Trucking v. Department of Labor, 2016). Judge Neil Gorsuch dissented.
The court did not do some random detention (they did let the rest of the crew) but they declared him the responsible party. In that case, he did break the Egyptian law.
If you are getting a job where you bear a certain responsibility, you have to make sure that the company is not breaking the law through you. You'll be responsible, and worse, if the company is headquartered overseas, you might bear the whole responsibility.
"Powerful people demand that there is always some scapegoat who they can abuse, even if they aren't at fault and it doesn't really help make things better."
Blood for the blood god, I suppose!
In places with stronger regulation and rule of law, these letterbox shell corporations are not allowed or strictly regulated.
I wonder what would have happened if he refused to sign
Obviously it doesn’t change the tragic situation, had he not signed up as custodian we’d be reading an article about a ship captain stuck on a ship Not to victim blame there is a difference between someone stole x thousands from my home vs I lost x thousands investing in an ostrich farm Both are sad, but ...
Somewhere down the line, yeah, Egypt is to blame, but we are the source of the problem - we are to blame. If you want these kind of things to decrease, try to buy local products, try to buy second hand, try to vote for the benefit of everybody (not just you or your group), try to pollute less, try to be conscious about the effects of your actions, and be less egoistic.
Nope. This is a lie fabricated by big corporations so that they don't seem responsible.
People have limited money and time. Just because you buy a more expensive product does not mean it is produced more ethically.
If two companies are selling their product for the same price then the one using non ethical behavior to lower production cost will still make more profit. It has a competitive advantage and will take over the market. Increasing the base price because you as a consumer are willing to pay more does not help the situation.
Some companies advertise with certain labels that imply that they are more ethical. One example of this is called green washing. Most of the time it is an advertisement stunt and does not improve the situation.
The research necessary to ensure the product you buy is ethically produced is way above the scope for an average consumer having a job and other obligations to do.
> We won't vote for politicians that make everybody's life better
Lobbyists have way more power over politicians than the common man trying to vote for the smaller evil.
Only if they are organized do they have a voice. For this they need to first understand that blaming consumers is a lie and that the industry needs to be regulated.
Not that it would help much, because you'd have to phisically escape anyway.
There is a mariner's charity in Greater New York that would help out. They would post a bond with ICE and drive the sailor to an airport or another ship.
Well, whether 9/11 security or what, they weren't allowed to do this. So the captain had been on the ship for over a year.
So, yes, it can happen here.
The locals usually donate food & supplies to the crew.
https://www.charlestoncitypaper.com/story/how-a-charleston-p...
That level of cognitive disconnect surely can't be held up as valid in any legal system that has greater cognitive ability to do 'connect the dots drawings'.
And the other is that the port authority wants the ship gone, and not vandalized or becoming a hazard to navigation. So they will require someone to stay on board to maintain it and keep it secure. Which can include getting Immigration to forbid the crew entrance to the country. While they are in port, it's much like being in the secure area of an airport - they're in a gray area and aren't actually in any country. So when that happens, it is illegal for them to leave it.
Last year a building collapsed here during construction and killed about 60 people. Stuff like that happens all the time.
I've also lived in the US for 9 years; I'm also well aware of the mistreatment of workers here, such as workers who are undocumented migrants, workers who are prisoners, workers who work gig companies, Amazon workers, and many others.
Jeff bezos is not pissing in a bottle. The people who profit the most from these ships are never trapped on them.
But now I’m gonna make an exception and point to the Hard Rock building collapse in New Orleans in 2019 which killed 3 workers and injured dozens more[1]. Things like that happen all the time in the US as well.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1031_Canal#Partial_collapse_du...
I'm sure there's a number for which I'd agree to be stranded on a boat off the coast of Egypt without power, but I suspect it's closer to 15x my salary.
As I understand it, this makes the latter 100x worse than the former.
Also people don't sign up to be abandoned on a ship, they're not told of that possibility, until it happens. They signed up to be merchant marines or seaman, not prisoners of ghost ships.
Just because you find getting bit by a dog more palatable than falling into a pit of snakes, doesn't make getting bit by a dog okay or acceptable.
It's pretty offensive to compare this to being held prisoner on a ship.
I'm going to blow your mind: RV toilets are just giant bottles with levers and valves.
Your reading of my statement is far from the mark, curiously so.
OSHA laws require companies allow bathroom breaks though.
Maybe you're right, and there will be lawsuits. That's a far cry from saying that the workers there wanted a union.
You're right that this is what we're outsourcing. All of the corporate trade agreements - American manufacturing was shipped overseas, and American labor forced to compete with what is often a modern form of slave labor.
It sure doesn't help actual slaves.
You’re being perfectly accurate; indentured servitude is consistent with both historical understandings of slavery and modern legal definitions; it was certainly distinct from the particular form of chattel slavery that was popular for a few hundred years and fell out of fashion in thr 19th century, and it is useful to be able to distinguish them since they overlapped in time and space, but that particular form of slavery was not the historically dominant form, itself, and it doesn’t make sense to narrow the definition to that particular form.
While, certainly, that form of chattel slavery was the most immediate concern for, say, American abolitionists, I think they would see it as badly missing the point and not actually abolishing slavery if indentured servitude had been restored to replace chattel slavery.
However I found a curious tidbit the other day; the 1619 ship had indentured servants not slaves. Not to belittle their plight, as they were de facto slaves as soon as they got on the ship.
I'm also not sure why everyone takes for granted that America not having as many manufacturing jobs is a bad thing...
They're similar, but have some significant and relevant distinctions.
Who has the power to push for better working conditions, transparency and accountability? Let's see:
- A sailor from poor a countries
- A customer from a wealthy country
- A cash stripped shipping company from a poor country
- A successful and massive company from a wealthy country
- A billionaire owning such company
- A politician in the same country
I’ve spent the past few months taking a deep dive into the Dubai real estate market. Excluding some villas, there are maybe 2 or 3 “very nice” buildings.
Many look nice on the outside, but rarely on the inside.
That seems to indicate a problem with the system you appear to prefer.
I feel like in order to make this claim, you'd need a pretty detailed definition of what "capitalism" is.
My summary won't do it justice, but basically our society has a myth that society has always been capitalistic, but there is some evidence that is not true. It's a pretty interesting take on some fundamental economic thoughts and theories, because the author is an anthropologist.
> The history of capitalism is diverse. The concept of capitalism has many debated roots, but fully[quantify] fledged capitalism is generally thought by scholars[specify][weasel words] to have emerged in Northwestern Europe, especially in Great Britain and the Netherlands, in the 16th to 17th centuries.[citation needed] Over the following centuries, capital accumulated by a variety of methods, at a variety of scales, and became associated[by whom?] with much variation in the concentration of wealth and economic power. Capitalism gradually became the dominant economic system throughout the world.[1][2](subscription required)[need quotation to verify][3][need quotation to verify] Much[quantify] of the history of the past 500 years is concerned with the development of capitalism in its various forms.
> It is an ongoing debate within the fields of economics and sociology as to what the past, current and future stages of capitalism are.
This does not leave me filled with confidence that people know what they mean when they mention "capitalism".
The problem is that there are two broad paradigms of what "capitalism" should mean:
1. Whatever the United States does.
This is what most people seem to be talking about when they talk about "capitalism", but it leaves something to be desired on theoretical grounds. Many aspects of it are not particularly economic.
2. An economic system defined... somehow. Mostly by constrast with "communism", which -- unlike "capitalism" -- has a large body of theory attached.
This is what people want to claim they are talking about. It is more or less conceptually incoherent, being defined only as the absence of policies covered by the term "communism". But all of those negative policies are very old, historically.
It is probably better to contrast capitalism with socialism though, and classical economics with communist theory. Not all capitalists ascribe to classical economics, just like not all socialists ascribe to communist theory.
Marx gave capitalism a name to talk about it as a step in the thrust of history, contrasting it with earlier feudalism systems, and to argue that it would inevitably lead to its own destruction while advocating that communism is the logical next step. It wasn't just "anything before communism" even for him.
Keynes, Hayek, and Smith all have a common thread on their belief in the market, despite the fact that they would in many cases advocate for very different policies.
Is anything about that theory specific to any time period? Does any part of it refer to a system of "capitalism"?
Marx, and those following Marx, wrote their works under the banner of "communism". Adam Smith did not write under any banner. He made observations.
> Marx gave capitalism a name to talk about it as a step in the thrust of history, contrasting it with earlier feudalism systems, and to argue that it would inevitably lead to its own destruction while advocating that communism is the logical next step. It wasn't just "anything before communism" even for him.
You're not getting what I'm saying. Marx gave capitalism a name, OK. Did he give it a definition? The whole problem I'm talking about here is that people use the word "capitalism" without having a meaning in mind for it to refer to.
The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily: and the law, besides, authorises, or at least does not prohibit, their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work, but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes, the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, or merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks, which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year, without employment.
-- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3300/3300-h/3300-h.htm#link2H...
Under the feudal system, lords had at least a nominal obligation to see to the welfare of their charges. I'm not claiming the relationship was otherwise equal, but that sense of obligation is now all but wholly absent.
I need to write fewer posts when it's late at night...
For example, 'gold' imported by ill-gotten means from some far off land actually provides 0 value in terms of material value creation. Of course 'oil' does, but remember the 'House of Saud' is kept in power by the US not with the promise of US access to 'cheap oil', rather, with the promise it will be sold at full value, on the open market - just not in some kind of strategic/complicated/backwater setup with the then Soviet Union or China. The US didn't 'go in and take all the oil', which they definitely had the power to do.
This exemplifies, in perhaps a crude, ham-fisted realpolitik manner the 'enforcement of trust' in systems I alluded to in my original comment: it's actually the US (and ultimately everyone's) interest to uphold fairly basic commercial and humanitarian standards in the long run.
And to be fair, these problems are to some extent a function of capitalism, because only 'very large' systems have the opportunity to plan on the generational scale, ergo, there's effectively no commercial enterprise for which the implementation of such standards really matters, that's generally the purview of governments.
I don't feel like I can make much justice for those aspects but here's my two cents: Selling oil on the free market disproportionately benefits those that own the means to process and resell it further. Or rather, those that ultimately coordinate global oil logistics. The global fossil fuel market doesn't exactly seem like a "free" market. There are few players and they are powerful.
What is the basis for this comparison? Compare the profit margins of a gas station (tiny) versus the profit margin of a company that needs to purchase fuel to operate a factory (could be anything). Or for that matter a company that needs products produced at one of those factories (the rest of us). The benefit is widespread and it's not at all obvious who benefits most, commodity or not.
Exclusive control of 'easy access to Oil' is overwhelmingly the power in that value chain.
The 'first order' issue is earlier in the process, it's that 'House of Saud' keeps most of the surplus for their family and furthermore use it to do some suppressive things.
The fossil fuel market it is very open, and market oriented. It has obvious geostrategic artifacts (notably the petrodollar, some politicians refusal to build pipelines, military support of interventions, OPEC), but it's generally open season. Nobody controls the flow of spice melange.
> Exclusive control of 'easy access to Oil' is overwhelmingly the power in that value chain.
Singapore might disagree. But what do they know?
I believe resource inequality will exist until free or near-free energy sources are developed, and even then, you still need ever expanding amounts of land/space. I believe it’s a consequence of scarcity and human nature.
This is the same logic that explain why building more roads does not reduce traffic congestion, because new demand is created to use the new roads and the traffic stays bad.
I doubt that you could find even one person on here who wouldn't support a blanket ban of outsourcing/externalization tomorrow.
When foreign entities are able to bid for a lot less, and pay a lot less, a lot of it has to do with the fact that they will not bother with 'end of life' for ships, or getting insurance, or worrying about the lives of people who are 'expendable'.
Those very nice buildings in Dubai come from some nasty labour practices.
If every piece of this puzzle from end-to-end were to have happened in a 'rich country' there'd be legal issues, PR/media, litigation, and a separate kind of bureaucracy altogether, meaning the 'alternative' for a lot of corporations is just 'wash their hands' of it, pay 1/2 the price, and get all the ugly parts 'off the books'.
We are to the point now where we have ample material surplus - we don't need any more 'plastic stuff from China' - it'd be worthwhile to start integrating a lot of 'off the books' stuff into trade deals. Ironically, it would be good for 'them' as well, because in chaotic, quasi-lawless systems it doesn't make sense for participants to invest in anything further ahead than what is in front of their noses (i.e. don't hate the Lebanese shippers for doing the only thing they can do to remain profitable, i.e. don't hate the player, hate the game) ... forcing some degree of transparency and accountability in these systems might raise prices a little bit, but the benefits would likely be immensely positive in the system overall.
It's nice that the story is made personal, about a real individual (think: that Tom Hanks film about someone stuck in international airport limbo) but that's not really the story here is it.