Specialist marine insurance intermediary Seacurus says
Specialist marine insurance intermediary Seacurus said that reported doubts about the insurance industry’s ability to insure the liability for unpaid wages of abandoned seafarers under the Maritime Labour Convention 2006 are inaccurate and ill-founded.
It is already an agreed principle under MLC 2006, which came into force in August 2013, that liability for the unpaid wages of seafarers currently falls to the recruitment and placement services which help seafarers find employment at sea. Some have rightly argued that this is a misdirected arrow and that it is the shipowner/employer, and not the agent, that should assume this liability.
In a positive move, it is now understood that tripartite talks between owners, unions and governments scheduled for April 2014 at the ILO headquarters in Geneva will finally address this issue, with talks set to concentrate on the specific inclusion of unpaid crew wages in the shipowner’s MLC obligation to repatriate crew in cases of abandonment.
Thomas Brown, managing director of Seacurus, says, “It is time for clarity and certainty on this important issue. The fact is that any cover that does not provide for the indemnification of unpaid wages fails to adequately protect seafarers against the real risk of abandonment. Effective employment protection must include crew wages, without which seafarers risk becoming the cashflow casualties of their employers’ insolvencies”
Source: Seacurus
