Crew Management, MLC & Leadership

MLC 2006 is not a list of aspirations sitting alongside the safety conventions — it is enforceable in the same way SOLAS and MARPOL are, through the Maritime Labour Certificate and the Declaration of Maritime Labour Compliance that every ship over a certain size now carries, and through port state control officers who can detain a vessel over a breach as readily as over a fire door left open. Treat it with that level of seriousness, because inspectors do.

The Convention is organised into five Titles, and it helps to think of them as a life-cycle rather than a checklist: minimum requirements to work aboard (age, medical fitness, training, recruitment through a properly licensed agency), conditions of employment (the seafarer employment agreement, wages, hours, leave, repatriation), accommodation and recreational facilities, health protection and welfare, and finally compliance and enforcement — the certification and inspection machinery that makes the first four Titles mean something in practice.

• SEA — the seafarer's employment agreement must be signed by both parties, written in terms the seafarer actually understands, and a copy kept accessible aboard; a contract nobody can read is not a valid agreement, whatever a company database says.
• Repatriation — a seafarer is entitled to be repatriated at no cost to themselves at the end of their agreed service period, and that entitlement survives illness, injury and most disputes with the company — it is not something a master withholds as leverage.
• Accommodation and food — minimum standards for cabin size, ventilation, heating, recreational space and catering are set out and inspected; a master who lets these slide because "it's only a short passage" is building the next complaint.

The rest-hour numbers are not arbitrary — they exist because fatigue accumulates faster than most people admit, and because one good night's sleep does not repay several short ones. The minimum is ten hours' rest in any twenty-four, and seventy-seven hours in any seven days, but the structure matters as much as the total: no more than two rest periods in the twenty-four hours, and one of them must be at least six hours long, because rest broken into short fragments does not produce the same recovery as one consolidated block.

A second, less quoted rule matters just as much in practice: the interval between consecutive rest periods should not exceed fourteen hours. It stops a watch pattern that is technically compliant on paper — enough total rest, correctly split into two periods — from still leaving someone awake and working an unreasonably long unbroken stretch in the middle.

The practical discipline this creates is that you plan the work around the rest, not the rest around the work. If a job genuinely cannot be done without breaching the minimum, the answer is to change the job — bring in extra hands, split it across more people, or delay it — not to adjust what gets written in the record afterwards. A rest-hour record that is compliant but does not reflect what actually happened is not a paperwork shortcut; it is a falsified safety record, and it is treated that way by inspectors.

Every ship covered by MLC must have an on-board complaints procedure, and every seafarer must be given a copy of it, along with the contact details of the competent authority ashore. The procedure has to let a seafarer complain about anything covered by the Convention — pay, hours, accommodation, treatment by a superior — through a defined chain, normally starting with the seafarer's immediate superior or head of department and rising to the master, without having to go over anyone's head to be heard.

Two features do the real work. First, the seafarer has a right to complain without fear of victimisation — no reduction in duties, no unfavourable treatment, no quiet punishment for having raised something. Second, if the on-board route genuinely fails to resolve the matter, the seafarer can take it outside the ship entirely, to the flag state or to a port state control officer at the next port, and that right is not something the on-board procedure can quietly make conditional on trying everything else first.

• Genuine, not decorative — a procedure that exists on paper but that nobody would actually use, because they fear the consequences, does not satisfy the Convention's intent, whatever the poster on the noticeboard says.
• A quiet crew is not evidence — the absence of complaints tells you nothing on its own; it is consistent with a genuinely content crew and equally consistent with one that has learned complaining changes nothing except how they are treated afterwards.
• The master's role — you are usually an early stage in the chain, not just the final approver of the outcome; treat a complaint that reaches you as a management problem to solve, not a discipline problem to close down.

Discipline is a process with a fixed order, and the order exists precisely because skipping steps under pressure is where most disciplinary decisions go wrong. Establish the facts before forming a view. Hear the person's own account, properly, even when the facts already look clear — an explanation can change what a proportionate response looks like, even if it rarely changes what happened. Decide a sanction that is proportionate to the conduct, not to how inconvenient the incident was for you. Record what was found, what was said, and what was decided. Then follow the company's own disciplinary procedure for anything beyond an informal word, because that procedure is itself part of what a flag state or a court will check afterwards.

Summary dismissal at sea should be treated as a last resort, not a first response, for reasons that go beyond fairness to the individual. A seafarer who is dismissed still generally retains a right to repatriation, so removing someone from duty does not remove the company's obligations to them. A dismissal made in anger, without a proper process, is also the kind most likely to be successfully challenged later — by the seafarer, by their union, or by a flag state investigating a complaint — which leaves the company worse off than if the master had taken a day to do it properly.

The working language requirement is a SOLAS obligation, not a cultural nicety, and the reason is entirely operational: muster instructions, safety briefings and orders given in an emergency have to be understood by everyone who needs to act on them, immediately, without translation happening in someone's head first. A ship can run day-to-day with several languages spoken informally among the crew, but the working language — the one used for orders, briefings and anything safety-critical — has to be genuinely common ground, posted, and actually used, not just declared in the SMS.

Multicultural crews add a layer beyond language: differences in how comfortable people are challenging a superior, admitting a mistake, or raising a problem before it becomes serious. A junior officer from a background where hierarchy is rarely questioned will not necessarily speak up just because you have told them your door is open — that behaviour has to be actively built, through how you respond the first few times someone does bring you a problem, not assumed because you said the right thing once in a briefing.

Leadership aboard comes down to a short discipline: delegate, verify, record. Delegating a task to a competent person is correct practice, not an abdication — but responsibility for the outcome stays with the master regardless of who did the work, which is exactly why verification is not optional. Check that the delegated task was actually done, and to the standard required, and keep a record that shows you did. A master who delegates without verifying is not leading a team; they are hoping one exists.

Both scenarios below are judgement calls, not calculations — work through the reasoning as you would talk it through in an oral exam, before stating the decision.