Seafarers’ wages - in search of a moral high ground

The year is 2010; the ‘Year of the Seafarer’. Yet UK headlines are filled with the threat of major shipping companies de-flagging if forced to pay seafarers, regardless of their nationality, the same UK minimum wage.

Jennifer Lavelle Institute of Maritime Law, University of Southampton

Existing UK law

The Race Relations Act 1976 – an Act to make fresh provision with respect to discrimination on racial grounds and relations between people of different groups – provides in s4(1) that it is unlawful for a person, in relation to employment by him at an establishment in Great Britain, to discriminate against another: