Ending Illegal Recruitment Fees in Maritime

When Isabelle Rickmers started TURTLE, one question kept coming back from seafarers to the team:

“How much do I need to pay to get this job?”

That’s backwards, and it’s illegal: recruitment fees charged to seafarers are prohibited under the Maritime Labour Convention. But it’s also routine.

So we started digging. Early on, we reached out to both, the Institute for Human Rights and Business (IHRB) and the Maritime Anti-Corruption Network (MACN).

With IHRB, a hunch became evidence: two surveys of thousands of seafarers found that around a third had been asked to pay for a job. Most who were asked did pay, many without knowing the practice was illegal.

Evidence on its own changes nothing, so the work became collective: the Action Group on Seafarer Recruitment Fees, now backed by more than 40 shipping companies, operators, charterers, and investors, P&Is, and insurers.

The Institute for Human Rights and Business and TURTLE launched a toolkit for employers that gives companies a clear, five-phase way to help the maritime industry tackle recruitment fees being charged to seafarers.

Discover it here: https://responsible-maritime-recruitment.ihrb.org/

As Isabelle puts it: “You cannot fix a talent shortage with a system that charges people to enter it.”