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Comment by lb1lf | Hacker News Reader

The crew are (were) paid by a crewing agency, typically providing a crew to the charterer, who finds a ship from some shipowner or other to offer freight services to commercial clients.

The shipowner is invariably located in a PO Box in a jurisdiction which makes Swiss banks seem downright extrovert; however, this is just a shell company controlled by an opaque holding company, &c.

Global shipping is a rather murky business, designed to facilitate tax and responsibility avoidance.

If this sounds interesting, investigative journalist Ian Urbina published a most informative (and scary) book on the subject last year - Outlaw Ocean.

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That book does sound interesting, thanks for the recommendation. Though the global shipping industry is not usually what I read about in my leisure time, this sounds like a worthwhile venture.

Indeed it is; he looks into various shady aspects of the marine industry - rogue fisheries, shipping, waste dumping, slavery &c - a grim read by anyone's standards.

On a related, but lighter note, the memoirs of Max Hardberger (Marine repo man, more or less) is an excellent collection of sea stories of the "Improvised ingenuity and brazenness while under fire" kind. I believe it was called "Seized!"

I'm definitely going to check it out.

And slavery, you say? How does this manifest? Are we talking about Somalian pirates conscripting poor people in third world countries or something? I have read that following the collapse of Libya after Qaddafi's overthrow, things degenerated so badly that slaves began to be bought and sold and are even sold there today - but I suppose I've never dug too deep into who's buying them and for what purpose.

And I love a good memoir, especially of a seafarer! That'll be going straight on my Amazon wishlist, thanks!

-The slavery bit I referred to is perhaps more accurately described as forced labour; the concept being that crewing agencies of the unscrupulous type trawl the countryside recruiting crew for offshore fisheries; the crew then have their ID papers confiscated and are put on vessels doing long stints offshore without any option of leaving, often for years on end, as the vessels they crew are more like rafts, being resupplied from shore rather than going back ashore themselves.

This is often 'legal' in the sense that the (more often than not illiterate) crew have signed contracts stating that they need to repay a sign-on fee equating years worth of wages.

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