How dangerous is work at sea and what are the prevalent risks to health for the seafarers employed in the maritime industry? These are the questions addressed in the following two chapters that constitute this first part of our examination of the health and safety consequences of work at sea at the present time.

Shipping accidents and fatalities to seafarers have declined over the past 20 years. However, the danger of working at sea remains potent. At the most basic level, published reports of lives lost at sea through accidental drowning, whether as the result of incidents involving single individuals or ships and whole crews, present a powerful picture of the hazards of the sea, and the notion of human frailty in the face of a hostile and unpredictable environment. At the same time they might also prompt some questions. Not just those concerned with the challenges of confronting the maritime environment, but also questions about the vulnerability of workers employed in ships that are unsafe workplaces and workers who, as a consequence of the commercial dictates of the industry, are made even more vulnerable by routinely performing unsafe acts during their work at sea. In addition they may stimulate speculation about whether these workers might experience exposure, not only to obvious physical dangers but also to less visible, but equally serious risks to their health present in ships’ cargoes or in the work involved in loading, unloading and transporting them at sea. Thinking about these matters leads to further consideration about the impact on seafarers’ health, safety and well-being of the changes that have occurred in recent decades in the organisation and operation of the business and regulation of maritime transport, which have helped place it in the vanguard of the world’s globalised industries.

There is much historical support for regarding seafaring as dangerous work. Loss of life and the appalling conditions of life aboard merchant ships were well documented in many official reports during the 19th century, as industrialisation created an increased demand for maritime transport. Figures recording overall loss of life at sea during this period as well as those that compare fatality rates among seafarers with those for other dangerous trades, identified seafaring as among the most hazardous of occupations (Royal Commission, 1885; Board of Trade, cited in AGPS, 1988). Although mortality rates had fallen overall, during the first half of the 20th century, seafaring was still being cited as the most dangerous occupation in the UK (Home, 1934). Times have changed of course, and conditions of life and work continued to improve at sea during the 20th century as indeed they did in most other forms of employment in advanced market economies. But despite these improvements, researchers at the start of the 21st century continue to rank merchant seafarers as close to the top of the league of hazardous occupations in terms of fatality rates (Roberts and Marlow, 2002).

Modelling techniques that extrapolate analysis of fatality data from countries in which it is thought that reported deaths are reasonably reliable has led to some estimates of the extent of fatalities globally. For example, an early attempt to do this based on British data led Goss et al. (1991) to conclude that over a ten-year period between 1979 and 1988 the average number of lives lost each year amounted to 13,555. The authors of this effort acknowledged its limitations and suggested ways of improving it, some of which were taken up in subsequent studies. Based on a refinement of the techniques used by Goss et al. (1991), Li (1998) looked at the period between 1961 and 1995 and arrived at the considerably lower estimate of 2431 seafarers’ lives lost annually. In a follow-up to this estimation, using a model that was based in mortality patterns among British seafarers and Institute of London Underwriters (ILU) data for ship casualties, Li and Wonham (2001, p. 113) revised this estimate to 2816. They suggest that with over a million seafarers ‘working in board ships worldwide at any given time’, the annual mortality from all causes for seafarers worldwide would be 6471 per year, a mean annual mortality rate 2.5 times higher than that for UK seafarers.

To explore the reasons for differences between national fleets a little further other studies have made comparisons between different countries and between different ship registers. Generally this is done in terms of data on vessel losses and while this is clearly an important measure of ship safety, it is not a direct nor (as the above studies showed) a complete measure of fatalities because it does not include those resulting from accidents and causes other than those involving the ship as a whole. As the previous studies pointed out, such events (including fatal occupational accidents, persons missing at sea, homicides, suicides and deaths from unexplained causes) are greater in number each year than those arising from maritime disasters (Nielsen and Roberts, 1999). Bearing this caveat in mind, available figures demonstrate considerable differences between different national fleets. For example, Nielsen (1999) compares seafarer mortality rates from all causes per 10,000 employees of 3.5 in Sweden, and 9.1 in the UK with his findings of 23.9 in Hong Kong and 26.5 in Singapore fleets. Comparison of mortality data based on ship casualties suggests that losses are generally greater among flag of convenience (FOC)² countries, and in non-OECD countries than among traditional maritime states. Li and Wonham (1999) go further and argue that a process of transfer of ships between the national registers of traditional maritime states to flags of convenience occurs. They suggest that the high correlation they identified between the total loss of ships in these two registers indicates that such transferred ships are more likely to be substandard, with a greater risk of suffering total loss. However, there is considerable variation in the findings and exceptions abound, which, as Alderton and Winchester (2002b) note, suggests that the position is in fact more complicated than aggregate statistics are able to demonstrate. Their study of ship casualty data taken from the Lloyds casualty data base for all 121 flag states for the years 1997–1999 grouped this data into five different categories: ‘old’ FOCs, ‘new’ FOCs, second (or international) ship registers,³ traditional and emerging national flags. They demonstrate that on average not only are there differences between casualty rates for national registers and flags of convenience, with the latter performing significantly worse, but that there are also differences between rates experienced by national and second registers, again with the second register ships experiencing greater casualty rates than those for national registers. They further show that within registers of the flags of convenience countries there are differences between the older FOCs and newer ones.

Like fatalities, but even more so, serious injuries to seafarers are also not only the consequence of maritime incidents involving the whole ship, but occur most frequently to individuals while they are in the course of their work or when travelling to or from their place of work on board ship. Maritime casualty statistics offer even less complete information on the extent of their occurrence than the previous section indicates to be the case in relation to fatalities. Routine reporting of serious injuries that are the result of occupational accidents in everyday ship operation is also not a reliable source of data. Although some national maritime authorities collect such information, and there are requirements concerning its reporting in many embedded maritime states, its completeness, quality and reliability is limited. Unlike in most land-based systems, there has been little attempt to adopt a comparable statutory definition of injury as the basis for data collection. Additionally, claims data may be available from P&I Clubs and other accident insurers which include information on injuries, for example, the UK P&I Club decennial review (UK P&I Club, 1999). However, as with claims data generally, this information is limited to that which fits the insurers’ particular definition of claim eligibility. Shipping companies also collect information on incidents that result in injuries to their employees, but differences in the ways in which they do so makes this data of limited use, even if access to it is granted. There are some voluntary schemes to report incidents and to disseminate information concerning them that may also include information on injuries to seafarers, such as the Nautical Institute’s International Marine Accident Reporting Scheme (MARS), but since such schemes are by no means comprehensive or consistent in the incidents reported, and are generally confined to narrative reporting, they provide little useful quantitative information on the nature or frequency of serious injuries to seafarers (Baker and McCafferty, 2005; Beedel, 2006).