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Sweatships on troubled waters Originally published: Canadian Dimension  on August 24, 2022 by John

Clarke (more by Canadian Dimension)  |  (Posted Aug 25, 2022)

 Capitalism, Class, Climate Change, Environment  Global  Newswire

 Cruise ships

Now that the grandees of global capitalism have decided to act as if the

pandemic were over, every e�ort is being made to restore previous norms

of mass consumption. It’s not surprising, then, that a major push is

underway to persuade people to head o� to sea in cruise ships. It is true

of course, that these vessels have had more than their share of COVID

outbreaks and that they continue to pose a threat in this regard but the

dominant “open for business” agenda cares little for such considerations.

As the impact of pandemic containment measures abated, it was expected

that, by the end of last year, worldwide ocean cruise capacity would

encompass 323 ships carrying 581,200 passengers. In the U.S. alone,

revenue generated by cruises is estimated at $37 billion.

It is very easy to regard luxury cruises as an expression of capitalism’s

worst instincts. They involve crass consumerism and appalling levels of

environmental degradation. They also reinforce the inequalities and

distorted development that underlie global tourism. At the same time, the

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Symphony of the Seas, an Oasis-class cruise ship owned and operated by Royal Caribbean International. It was the largest cruise ship in the world by gross tonnage when built in 2018. Photo by roli_B/Flickr.

backdrop to the recreational setting they provide is the intensely

exploitative “sweatship,” with its dreadful working conditions. The various

elements of this pernicious mix are worth considering.

Environmental impact The recreational cruise constitutes a particularly destructive and entirely

needless assault on the natural world. “A single large cruise ship will emit

over �ve tonnes of NOX emissions, and 450kg of ultra�ne particles a day,”

German air pollution expert Axel Friedrich told The Guardian. According to

Daniel Rieger, of the German environment group Nabu, cited in the same

Guardian article, “One cruise ship emits as many air pollutants as �ve

million cars going the same distance.” Dr. Bryan Comer of the

International Council on Clean Transportation has shown that “even the

most e�cient cruise ships emit more carbon dioxide per passenger

kilometer (CO2/pax-km) than a passenger jet.”

In an opinion piece last year, Kim Heacox, a former Alaskan Park ranger

who is very familiar with the ecological impact of cruise ships, concluded

that “If anything should change after Covid-19 and not go back to normal,

it’s cruise ships and the voracious industry that operates them.” He points

to the enormous size of the vessels that are each bringing thousands of

passengers to visit the Alaskan coastline. “They don’t look like ships any

more. They look like the boxes the ships came in, huge �oating milk

cartons —ponderous and white.” One ship is now under construction that

will carry 10,000 passengers and include a theme park, complete with a

roller coaster.

The same cruise ships that visit Alaskan ports of call pass along the British

Columbia coastline, treating the area as a toilet bowl in the process: “More

than 31bn litres (8.5bn U.S. gallons) a year of pollution is estimated to be

discharged o� the west coast of Canada by cruise ships on their way to

and from Alaska.” Huge quantities of toxic sewage are dumped into the

sea.

But the worst pollution comes from the scrubbers that clean exhaust

gases such as sulphur oxide and nitrogen oxide, as well as particulates,

from the heavy bunker oil used as marine fuel. This means that just one

cruise ship can shed roughly 200 million litres of waste as it sails the BC

coast. As might be expected, this kind of destructive behaviour is abetted

by weak regulatory systems and even weaker enforcement mechanisms.

Ross Klein points to one of the major cruise operators, Carnival

Corporation, which was found to be discharging plastic into the oceans. It

received a $40 million �ne in 2016. But it went ahead and committed

another 800 o�ences incurring another $20 million in �nes. “That’s a

corporation that earns over $4 billion a year tax free. That’s not even a

wrap on the knuckles,” Klein points out.

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Staff pose aboard the deck of the MS Nieuw Statendam, a Pinnacle-class cruise ship operated by Holland America Line, 2018. Photo courtesy Holland America Line.

Cruises generate revenue and economic activity, in however distorted and

harmful a form, in the places they select as ports of call. Nonetheless, the

damage they do has provoked signi�cant opposition. The full scale

resumption of cruise activity after COVID restrictions were lifted was met

by angry protests in both Victoria and Seattle as well as in Italy, Spain,

Norway and Germany.

To properly assess the impact of cruises on the places they visit, it is

necessary to consider the broader context of global inequality. Cruise

operators confront poor countries as predators, seeking to extract pro�ts

while o�ering the most dubious economic bene�ts in return. During the

winter months, over half the world’s cruise ships operate in Caribbean

waters. In an article for Forbes, James Ellsmoor, a young entrepreneur

specializing in sustainable development in remote and island communities

notes:

E�orts are underway to tilt the balance somewhat and ensure fairer

contracts between cruise companies and their Caribbean destinations but

the exploitative nature of the relationship won’t be remedied by tinkering

and polite pressure. The cruise industry is a major component of a system

of global tourism that rests on exploitation and that distorts the economic

development of poor countries.

Tourist ventures may

mean that local elites

take a cut of the pro�ts

and states generate

some revenue, but the

very idea of shaping

the economy of poor

countries su�ering the

legacy of colonial rule

around the provision of

recreation for visitors

from rich countries is a

travesty. The extent to

which tourism functions as a component of global imperialism can be

seen from studies showing that “up to 80 percent of every dollar spent by

tourists goes to the global companies that own Caribbean resorts and

cruises.”

Sweatships Cruise ships are, of course, places of work and, as such, they re�ect the

reordering of the global workforce that has taken place during the

The industry has been accused of using its size to bully local governments into negotiating more cruise-friendly contracts that constrain the local economy.

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neoliberal decades. Almost 20 years ago, War on Want and the

International Transport Workers’ Federation issued a report which

concluded that cruise ships were a story of “apartheid at sea” below deck

in which “workers from poor countries are su�ering conditions

reminiscent of Asia’s export processing zones.” It was this report that

coined the term “sweatships.”

A more recent examination of the role of cruise operators as employers by

a scholar intimately acquainted with the industry reveals that a typical

cruise ship goes to sea with between 2,000 and 3,000 crew members. It

goes on to tell us:

The global injustices that cruise ships reinforce in the countries they visit

are mirrored among those they employ. Ross Klein sums it up this way:

When I �rst turned my attention to this issue, I rather imagined that luxury

cruises would cater to the kind of people who travelled �rst-class as

portrayed in the movie Titanic. Yet, these recreational ventures are far

from the preserve of the super-rich. One study found that some 15

percent of the U.S. population had gone on a cruise and that seven to

eight percent had done so in the last three years. This suggests a pattern

of mass consumption that involves signi�cant numbers of working-class

people.

As a young trade union activist in Britain, in the early 1970s, I well

remember making several futile attempts to convince fellow workers to

support the appeals of the Spanish unions to deprive Franco’s fascist

regime of revenue by shunning cheap holidays in Spain. Sadly, a sunny

beach at a reasonable price frequently won out over class solidarity. It’s

much the same with capitalism’s ugly turn to cruise ships as a source of

pro�t. We should spread awareness of just how reprehensible this

industry is but there is little to be gained by the pointing of a moralizing

�nger at the average consumer.

Rather, in our unions and social movements we need to do all we can to

challenge the real culprits, the big companies that function as cruise

operators. We should support all e�orts to protect the natural

environments they threaten, the destinations they plunder and the

workers they exploit. These �oating palaces represent everything that is

greedy and destructive in this society and we must struggle for a world

based on principles of rationality, global justice and ecological

sustainability where they are simply inconceivable.

The mandatory workload of a worker on a cruise ship is 308 hours a month. That is a 77-hour work week. That means eleven hours every day of the week. Many workers work much more than that, but that is what they are paid for.



the average cruise ship carries people from the First World as passengers and people from the Third World as workers.



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John Clarke is a writer and retired organizer for the Ontario Coalition

Against Poverty (OCAP).

Monthly Review does not necessarily adhere to all of the views conveyed in articles republished at MR Online. Our goal is to share a variety of left perspectives that we think our readers will �nd interesting or useful. —Eds.

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