Bravo to Bikram Bhatia for painting in black and white one of shipping’s worst kept secrets – overworked men and women at sea. It’s well known that shipping tends to fudge its reporting of work and rest hours at sea, but Bhatia, for his PhD dissertation, has spent the last three years assembling so much data on the matter that authorities must act. Under the Maritime Labour Convention 2006 (MLC), a seafarer has the right to regulated hours of work and hours of rest. A record of a seafarer’s daily hours of rest or hours of work must be kept onboard in the working language of the ship and in English, and must be signed by the seafarer and the master or other authorised person. The seafarer must be given a copy. In his PhD dissertation for the World Maritime University, funded through support from the ITF Seafarers’ Trust, Bhatia surveyed 6,304 seafarers, interviewed 55 port state control (PSC) officers, and went through the data of 16,551 PSC inspections. Key findings of the research include the statistic that 64.3% of seafarers adjusted their work/rest records, while PSC officers are struggling to detect non-compliance. More worrying is the coercion from shore. 66.7% of respondents had reports questioned by their company, 60.1% were expected to adjust their reports, and 49.1% were instructed to. High compliance rates reported by PSC masked seafarers’ reported non-compliance, creating what Bhatia has described as a “false narrative at policy levels”. The root causes lie in the regulatory framework that is very loose, allowing flag states to compete on granting manning certificates with low numbers and expecting shipowners and shipmanagers to self -regulate. A serious debate is required at the International Maritime Organization on minimum manning scales. One idea might be for each vessel to be given a protected website, run by the flag state, where each seafarer is allowed to log-in under guaranteed secrecy terms. Contents Front page: Shipping braces for the FuelEU Maritime eraEditor’s Comment: How to solve the work/rest issue at seaDecember 2024 Review2024 Annual ReviewMarkets TankersMarkets Dry BulkMarkets ContainersAnalyst AbstractMonthly BrokerFeature: Can India reach its ambitious shipbuilding targets?Interview: Adrian ScalesDataOpinion: Treading warily into the new year TagsSplash Extra Archive Splash Extra December 2024