Insights · Regulation · Seafarers
More than a million seafarers keep the world's fleet moving, often months from home and under flags far from their own. The MLC 2006 is the treaty that sets the floor beneath their working lives — the fourth pillar of maritime law, completing the framework that SOLAS, MARPOL and STCW began.
The three great IMO conventions regulate the ship: SOLAS keeps it safe, MARPOL keeps it from polluting, and STCW makes sure its crew are trained. For a long time none of them squarely addressed the people doing the work — their pay, their hours, their food, their right to come home. The Maritime Labour Convention, 2006 was the International Labour Organization's answer to that gap, consolidating dozens of older maritime labour instruments into a single comprehensive treaty.
It is widely called the "Seafarers' Bill of Rights", and it has become the fourth pillar of the international legal framework for shipping. Adopted in 2006, it entered into force on 20 August 2013, twelve months after the ratification threshold — at least 30 ILO member states representing at least a third of world gross tonnage — was crossed.
The convention's substance is organised into five titles, each covering one part of life at sea.
| Title | Covers |
|---|---|
| Title 1 | Minimum requirements to work at sea — minimum age, medical fitness, training |
| Title 2 | Conditions of employment — contracts, wages, hours of work and rest, leave, repatriation |
| Title 3 | Accommodation, recreational facilities, food and catering |
| Title 4 | Health protection, medical care, welfare and social security |
| Title 5 | Compliance and enforcement — certification, inspection and complaints |
Together these guarantee a seafarer the right to a written employment agreement, to be paid regularly, to limits on working hours, to decent accommodation and food, to medical care aboard and ashore, and — crucially — to repatriation when a contract ends or a ship is abandoned.
Title 5 gives the convention teeth. Ships of 500 gross tons and above on international voyages must carry a Maritime Labour Certificate and a Declaration of Maritime Labour Compliance, issued after inspection by the flag state or a recognised organisation. And the MLC is enforced in port: a port state control officer can inspect a foreign ship's labour conditions and, in serious cases, detain it. The same machinery that catches an unsafe ship can now catch an unfair one.
The Maritime Labour Convention was designed to be both firm on rights and flexible on implementation, so that it could become as universal as the safety conventions it sits beside. International Labour Organization, on the MLC 2006
One of the convention's most important developments came in 2014, when it was amended to require financial security for two situations seafarers had long been exposed to: abandonment — being left unpaid and unprovisioned aboard a ship the owner has walked away from — and compensation for death or long-term disability. Owners must now hold insurance or other security to cover these, and a certificate of that cover must be posted on board. The amendments turned a moral expectation into an enforceable guarantee.
A ship's labour standing is part of the same risk picture as its safety and its sanctions exposure. Vessels at the opaque end of the fleet — old tonnage under flags of convenience, with hard-to-trace owners — are also where abandonment and unpaid-wage cases cluster. Reading a ship's flag, age and ownership chain tells you a great deal about the conditions the people aboard are likely to face. On Marifest you can search any of 97,000+ vessels in the registry, resolve the owner and operator behind the hull, and check the vessel's compliance standing in one view. The terms used here are defined in the maritime glossary.
How Marifest uses it
Flag, age and ownership shape the conditions a crew is likely to face. Marifest keeps all three on the open file, so the human dimension of a vessel is never out of view.
A ship's flag decides who certifies its labour standards — and the flag is on every vessel file.
Abandonment cases cluster on old tonnage under weak flags. Build year and type are surfaced on each file.
The MLC holds the shipowner to account. Marifest ties each vessel to the owner and operator behind it.
Specs, flag, ownership and sanctions standing sit together, so the labour question is answered in context.