Seafarers are highly-skilled and highly paid professionals.
Now that might be a bit of surprise to many people in the industry who have gotten the image that seafarers are destitute.
A misleading narrative
We understand why. There’s a narrative being pushed by various parties that seafarers are poor, and are suffering terribly.
And like all the very ‘best’ bits of misleading narrative there is always, of course, a grain of truth.
Seafarers do have a very hard job – away from their families, out of their regular culture, and missing all of those everyday comforts and things that are around them when they’re at home. There’s fairly little that can be done about that, it’s part of the job and has been ever since the first commercial seafarers put to sea.
And, yes, there are sadly cases where people are mistreated through bullying, or harassment, not being paid wages, or abandonment. These are all examples of abuse. And they ought to be condemned. And we do condemn it.
Thankfully, such cases are very rare. There were at least 105,000 ships greater than 100 gross tons in 2023, according to the UN Convention on Trade and Development and the International Chamber of Shipping reports that there are about 1.9 million seafarers in the world. While one badly treated seafarer is one too many, the number of badly treated seafarers is a tiny fraction of that number. So we need to keep it all in a bit of perspective.
And it’s all a bit irrelevant to the main thrust of this point which is that seafarers are not destitute and are in fact, well-paid. We only included it here because, inevitably, after we publish this article, various parties will jump on it and accuse us of ignoring the issues of unpaid wages and the like.
Myth of the destitute sailor
There are a few areas which give rise to the myth of the destitute seafarer. One, is probably Hollywood portrayals of seafarers in the days of sail. Another will be the labour organisations who talk of abandonment, unpaid wages and the like – and that, to some degree, is fair enough because they are trying to raise awareness of important social problems that need tackling. Yet another area is the “whip around” or “pass the hat” that seems to happen at a lot of maritime events (or it used to, back in the days when we all carried actual physical cash) when the organiser would raise money for seafarers. Another is the ILO rates. Look up seafarer pay rates on the web and you’re highly likely to get the ILO rates, which are a few hundred US dollars a month, which gives the impression that seafarers aren’t paid well. But seafarers are, in reality, paid a lot more than that.
All of this creates a narrative of poverty-stricken seafarers. Maybe it was true in the past. But today? It’s misleading.
Facts: not destitute, but well-paid
We’ve said it once, we’ll say it again. Merchant seafarers are not destitute and are in-fact well paid. There even more well paid than you might realise when you take into account the cost of living.
Let’s look at Filipino seafarers as they are, by far, the largest contingent of commercial seafarers whether you’re looking at officers, ratings, STCW-qualified, etc.
So, how much are they paid?
Sources vary. But we can get a bit of an idea. Two different Philippines-focused sites give different numbers, this one and this one. It looks like they’re using the same table on both websites, and all figures are in U.S. dollars.
We will have a look at PhilippineGo website and we’ll have a look at a few different ranks. Figures are monthly pay, US dollars
| Rank | Product tanker | Chemical | VLCC | LPG / LNG |
| Master | 11,500-12,500 | 12,000-14,000 | 8,488-14,067 | 12,800-15,400 |
| 3rd Mate | 3,300-3,800 | 3,500-4,420 | 3,100-3,800 | 3,500-4,500 |
| 2nd Engineer | 8,000-11,062 | 10,200-11,400 | 10,400-10,400 | 9,900-12,300 |
| Able (AB Seafarers) | 1,450-1,950 | 1,450-2,100 | 1,450-1,950 | 1,700-2,100 |
| Cook | 1,750-2,300 | 1,875-2,500 | 1,750-2,300 | 1,800-2,500 |
There’s a whole load more data there too for container ships, ro-ro bulkers and so on and so on. While data sources differ, we can see immediately that ship’s masters are well paid.
What about the Able Seafarers?
Cost of living
Well, we need to take into account the cost of living.
Numbeo.com is a website that could well be the world’s largest cost-of-living database, using the crowdsourcing data collection technique. It claims to record 9,535,826 prices in 12,463 cities entered by 860,126 contributor.
The Cost of Living in Sydney is 103.2% higher than in Manila (excluding rent) and the Cost of Living in Melbourne is 97.0% higher than in Manila (excluding rent). Groceries Prices in Sydney are 80.4% higher than in Manila; Groceries Prices in Melbourne are 83.9% higher than in Manila, according to Numbeo.
An AB seafarer earning about USD$1,450 (about 82,000 Philippine Peso) and living in Manila would need about 195,962.6₱ (A$5,194) in Sydney to maintain the same standard of life.
And let’s remember, Manila is probably the most expensive place to live in the Philippines. Not every seafarer is going to live there – some will hail from more remote, lower cost, areas.
Captain Melwyn Noronha, CEO of Shipping Australia, recalls that: “I came up through the ranks, hailing from my native India, and the rate of pay that I got from working at sea allowed me to live more than comfortably. While I certainly wish for current seafarers to be paid adequately and commensurately with the hardships of the job, we can see that the current perception, which is held by some people, that seafarers do not have an adequate wage is not quite right”.
