Abdul Nasser Saleh says he rarely got a good night’s sleep during the near-decade he spent working without pay on a cargo ship abandoned by its owner at ports along the Red Sea.
By night, he tossed and turned in his bunk on the aging Al-Maha, he said, thinking of the unpaid wages he feared he’d never get if he left the ship. By day he paced the deck, stuck for the last two years in the seaport of Jeddah, unable to set foot on land because of Saudi Arabia’s strict immigration laws.
Leaving at last felt like returning to his “center of gravity,” he said.
Saleh’s plight is part of a global problem that shows no signs of abating. The United Nations has logged an increasing number of crew members abandoned by shipowners, leaving sailors aboard months and sometimes years without pay. More than 2,000 seafarers on some 150 ships were abandoned last year.
The number of cases is at its highest since the U.N.’s labor and maritime organizations began tracking abandonments 20 years ago, spiking during the global pandemic and continuing to rise as inflation and logistical bottlenecks increased costs for shipowners. Cases have touched all parts of the globe, with workers abandoned on a fish factory ship in Angola, stranded on an icebreaker in the Netherlands and left without food or fuel in Istanbul.
Yet the nations that register these ships and are required by treaty to assist abandoned seafarers sometimes fail to get involved in the cases at all. Tanzania, which registered the ship where Saleh was abandoned, never acted on his case or even responded to emails, said Mohamed Arrachedi, a union organizer who worked on Saleh’s case.
Shipowners often abandon crew members when they are hit by rising fuel costs, debt or unexpected repairs they can’t afford. Some owners vow to pay when their finances turn around. But those promises can mean little to the men on board, who often resort to handouts for food and basic supplies. Many are also supporting families back home and risk losing everything if they step off their ships.
Crew members or the countries where the ships are registered or docked can pursue the shipowners in court. But recovering past wages can be a yearslong battle that often fails.
Returning to Egypt in April was joyous, Saleh, 62, told The Associated Press, but also brought sad news. His wife and son were badly in need of medical care, he said. They had struggled during his decade without an income.
Saleh, who was originally from Syria, said he had once been proud of his work as an engineer on the Al-Maha, which made its money ferrying livestock for Ramadan festivities between Sudanese and Saudi Arabian ports.
From tip to tail, the Al-Maha spans the length of a football field, covered in dust and dirt and rusted green paint. While stuck in Saudi Arabia, Saleh and a small group of crewmates, also from war-torn Syria, placed a prayer mat in the pilothouse overlooking the port. A stray cat they named Apricot took up residence on the ship and followed Saleh around.
Saleh ran laps along the deck at sunrise and sunset. Every day he clocked 1,500 meters, while around him mammoth container ships arrived and departed from the busy port as his situation stayed the same. His debts accumulated from years of borrowing money to help his family pay rent.
The days blurred into a painful monotony.
“I can’t tell day from night anymore,” he said in a video recording he shared with the AP in January while still aboard the ship, filmed as the day’s light faded and a pinkish glow cast over the harbor.
A SURGE IN CASES
Owners abandon ships and crews for a myriad of reasons.
Cases first jumped in the early days of the pandemic, at a time when canceled shipments, port delays and quarantine restrictions pushed shipping traffic into disarray. At the same time, demand for goods by homebound consumers led to a rush of new orders for ships. But global trade soon shrank, and combined with spikes in fuel and labor costs, many of those new vessels are now at risk of being idled.
The increase in the number of cases logged in recent years is also due to better reporting efforts by the International Maritime Organization and the International Labor Organization — the two U.N. agencies responsible for tracking abandonments. With seafarer advocates, they’ve worked to identify cases and assist abandoned crews.
Cases last year were “alarmingly surpassing the previous year’s record,” the ILO and IMO said in a report this winter.
Many ships that are abandoned are barely seaworthy and servicing less profitable routes unattractive to the world’s major container lines. They represent a fleet of smaller companies sometimes operating on the edge of legality, for which a minor financial hit can lead to a cascade of unforeseen problems.
Owners might decide it’s cheaper to abandon a ship than try to save it.
The U.S., which has some of the stiffest maritime regulations in the world, isn’t immune to the global phenomenon.
In 2022, Teeters Agency & Stevedoring, a family-run company registered in Florida, dumped two 1970s-era cargo vessels — the Monarch Princess and Monarch Countess — that for years operated as a bridge for sending beat-up cars, cheap electronics and other goods to Haiti. The two ships were flagged to registries run by small island nations — Vanuatu, located east of Australia, and St. Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean — criticized by watchdog groups for lax oversight and financial secrecy.
After the owners became insolvent and stopped paying dockage fees, the Port of Palm Beach and a private marina sued and a federal judge ordered the two vessels sold at auction. One fetched just $5,000.
Abandoned ships are sometimes so old and worn that “even the scrap guys lose money stripping it of anything of value,” said Eric White, a ship inspector for the International Transport Workers’ Federation, or ITF, a seafarers’ union.
Left hanging by Teeters were the ships’ crews of mostly Ukrainian seafarers, who suddenly had no way of sending money to families back home in what was now a war zone after Russia’s invasion. In total, the 22 men were owed $130,000 covering more than three months, White said. If not for $22,000 in donations from local seafarers’ charities, none of them would have made it off the ship and back home, according to White.
The ship’s captain, Ievgen Slautin, said although he was still owed around $15,000, he thanked God he was abandoned in the United States.
“If it was in some other country, I could have been left there to simply die,″ he said.
Neither Teeters nor a lawyer who once represented the company returned emails or phone calls seeking comment.
Even workers who win promises from shipowners to pay their wages sometimes are left waiting for money after they leave their ships. Court cases to seize or auction derelict ships can take years to resolve. Other times, offers aren’t made in good faith. Some workers have departed for the airport only to find they were given fake plane tickets, union inspectors said.
One seafarer, Mohammad Aisha, drew international attention in 2021 when reports surfaced that he was living alone on a darkened and abandoned cargo ship in Egyptian waters, forced to swim to shore for food and water.