Abandonment Map + Working in the Black Sea
Launch of seafarer abandonment map, the UK's blockade and how the sea is a bad place to be right now
Seafarer Abandonment Map
This week, researchers Eliza Ader and Miriam Matthiessen published their seafarer abandonment map, alongside a free and open source dataset that they compiled. This is the first time abandonments have been mapped at scale.
It’s a crucial bit of work, and one they did in their spare time (a massive undertaking!) so big kudos. You can follow them here and here. I’ve been playing around with the dataset and doing some mapping work too, which I’ll release here in due course.
Laboring on The Black Sea
I want to bring up the workers from all over the world in the Black Sea right now, whose workplace (like many) has become a warzone. This morning someone posted a picture of something smoking off the coast of Odessa:
People began to speculate that it was a civilian ship, bringing up marine tracking services and spotting a cargo ship (the Helt, flagged to Panama) at sea. Thankfully it seems like it wasn’t, as the ship is still transmitting an AIS signal, but it is currently (18:50GMT, Wednesday) static, at anchor.
In an interview conducted by Tradewinds with a merchant vessel currently in Odessa (not necessarily Helt, but potentially), the captain said “We strongly fear that [the] ship and her crew will be used as human shields!” UV, a Ukrainian news outlet, claim that the ship was ordered into dangerous waters by Russian military, in order to be used as a human shield [update 3/2: this site has been downed, but NYT have also briefly reported on it]. This is unverified, but whatever the case the people that labor at the gears of the world’s circulatory system, away from home for months at a time, didn’t sign up to float in a warzone, waiting.
The UK said it’s basically going to blockade itself
I don’t know enough about Ukraine/Russia historic relations to weigh in there, but I can point to a couple things happening at sea. This week Grant Shapps, secretary of state for Transport, announced that UK ports were going to blacklist ships connected to Russia.
In the accompanying letter, he announced that:
The problem with this is that in the sprawling, explosive geography of shipping, a great deal of ships are somehow connected to russia. It’s not clear how far the categorisation of ‘connected with Russia’ extends, but around 10.5% of the maritime labor force are Russian, so if this blacklist includes russian-crewed ships then we could be looking at a spate of abandonments as smaller shipping companies operating on thin profit margins collapse after being turned away. Russia isn’t a hugely popular flag as far as flags go, but its still a lot of ships:
This will also mean further backups and tangles in the UK’s supply webs, exacerbating the so-called ‘cost of living crisis’ (planned austerity and apalling wealth distribution). Whilst I’m generally supportive of sanctions and boycotts on war states (like the BDS movement on Israel, obviously), this feels badly thought out and could be one of the sanctions that just hurts ordinary working-class people in the UK and on ships far away from home, rather than oligarchs (read: billionaires).
Interestingly, this blacklist has also been taken up by shipping companies themselves: MSC, Maersk, CMA CGM, Hapag-Lloyd, ONE and Yang Ming have all refused to move cargo. Miriam Matthiessen pointed out that the framing of this as Corporate Social Responsibility or companies picking up the good fight clashes with how labor organisation around refusal to serve war states is framed — such as the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in Oakland refusing to unload the Israeli boat ZIM, or workers in Livorno in Italy refusing to load an arms shipment destined for Israel in 2021 during the spike in the bombardment of Palestine. To be clear, the action on the part of the shipping companies isn’t politics, it’s business planning.
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As ever, drop me a line and let me know what’s good/interesting/useful here, or just say hey. Also please consider sharing this — i’ve decided I’d like to move this from being a sounding board/publishing schedule into something with a bit more of a base. Thanks!