The Maritime Labour Convention 2006: A basic guide to liabilities

The Maritime Labour Convention 2006 (MLC) is a new Convention which aims to bring together and update existing conventions regarding the employment of seafarers onboard commercial ships worldwide. Although there is much discussion about the Convention, and the document itself runs to over 100 pages, the principal new obligations regarding minimum standards in respect of liability can be simply summarised as follows:

1. NOTICE PERIODS
- Minimum of 7 days.

2. SICK WAGES
- Minimum of 16 weeks (4 months).

3. REPATRIATION
- You must repatriate seafarers in the event of:
a) termination or expiry of their employment,
b) ship's loss or foundering,
c) illness or injury or otherwise being unable to continue in their role,
d) ship's entry to a war zone and seafarer exercises option to leave,
e) in the event of the shipowner being unable to fulfil their obligations as employer.

3. FINANCIAL SECURITY
- You must have financial security' in place, to meet your liability to repatriate crewmembers and pay them any compensation due in the event of your inability to do so (for instance, even payable when you are insolvent).
- This is not a 'compulsory insurance' like CLC or Bunker Convention, but if you cannot prove (by lodging a bond to cover these costs or by showing ringfenced funds in some other way) that these costs would be met, then you will need to buy insurance to respond in these situations. If you have an International Group Mutual P&I Certificate that will do, otherwise you may need to buy an 'MLC top-up' insurance to add onto your commercial P&I Certificate.

4. SEAFARER EMPLOYMENT AGREEMENTS (SEAs)
- You must put certain basic things in the seafarer's employment contracts.
- You can use a pro-forma MLC-compliant contract called a Seafarer Employment Agreement or you can use your own contract so long as it contains all the minimum information required.

CONTRACT WORDING: 'including, without limitation...'

Ship owners benefit from a range of limitation conventions and contractual limitations and often their insurances (especially P&I Cover) will be prejudiced in the event that they optionally waive those rights to limitation, so careful attention to contract wording is essential.

A contract which seeks to have the ship owner waive his rights will normally include an express term to that effect, i.e. 'the owner hereby agrees to waive their right to limit under the LLMC Conventions, CLC Conventions or any other ...' or 'the Owner shall pay claims for damage to Charterers property arising under this contract in full and without limitation'.

This language is not to be confused with the phrase from american legalese which is now common in many commercial legal contracts worldwide - 'the Owner agrees to indemnify / settle ... including, without limitation, claims for x, y, z.'. Some have argued that this may be construed as an agreement to settle those specific listed claims without limitation, but this is not the case. This arrangement of words merely means 'included but not limited to'.

For example, if a ship owner agrees to pay the Charterers claims for losses resulting from the ship owner's crew's negligence including, without limitation, claims for pollution, property damage and third party injury, then those types of claims resulting from the ship owner's crew's negligence are definitely to be met by the shipowner, but this does not limit or prevent the Charterer from also claiming for other types of claims resulting from the ship owner's crew's negligence. Any application of limitation conventions is unaffected by the clause.

Another confusing phrase which is used in the same context is 'without limitation to the generality of the foregoing' or 'without prejudice to the generality of the foregoing', which merely means where you express a rule then give some examples, the examples cannot be said in any way to weaken or restrict the general rule which stands as if the examples had not been given.