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.

GUIDE: Ship Bouyancy

This is a subject which occupies many thousand pages of academic and professional books. However, to the layman there are a few general principles that it is useful to know.

1. Water provides a 'buoyant force' against objects placed in it.
Essentially it forces them upwards. The amount of buoyant force pushing upwards is equal to the amount of water displaced by the object. The more water you push out of the way, the more force pushes back against you.

2. A ship floats when the amount of water displaced by its hull weighs more than the ship itself.
So if a ship weights five tonnes but its shape means that its hull is making a hole in the water equivelent to about seven tonnes of water, then it will float. There is a ´buoyant force´ of seven tonnes pushing the object up and only a weight of five tonnes pushing it down.

3. If you load more cargo on a ship it will sit lower in the water.
This seems obvious but what is happening is that the ship becomes heavier than the water it is displacing, and so starts to sink. However, in doing so the hull goes deeper into the water, displacing more water, and eventually the water displaced again becomes heavier than the ship, so the ship stabilises at a floating level again.

4. Ships sit higher in cold or salty water.
This is a major reason why internationally trading ships have loadlines on their sides. The lines correspond to different climates, fresh and salt water, so you can keep at a safe level throughout transit. Salty water is heavier than fresh water and cold water is heavier than hot water. So a ship´s hull needs to displace less, i.e. sit lower, to float. For example, if a ship sits high in the water at Felixstowe (cold, seawater), the same ship dropped into an African lake (warm, freshwater), would sit a lot lower in the water.