Pinoy Seamen May Be Extinct In 10 Years – Group

From the world’s top supplier of seafarers, the Philippines’ seamen may become extinct on global oceangoing ships in a decade due to worsening abuse of personal disability compensation and unfair award in disability compensation lawsuits, the International Maritime Employers Council (IMEC) has warned.

The IMEC Ltd., a global organization of representatives of foreign ship owners with offices in Hampshire, United Kingdom and Makati City in the Philippines, said it recognizes the fact that the Philippines used to be a dominant supplier for international vessels.

However, it noted that personal disability claims abuse has contributed to the significant drop of Filipino seafarers getting recruited in the past years.

IMEC chief executive officer Francesco Gargiulo said the Philippines needs to address the problem that is making the country notorious among ship owners and maritime employers.

“You can see that we continue to get a lot of complaints from our members who are obviously all major employers in the maritime sector, and this is the number one issue that I think the Philippine administration should be addressing now – this is what is putting off the employers,” Gargiulo said.

While the Philippines remains to be the biggest source of manpower for the industry, he said that competing countries with their own pool of available seafarers “have been able to take advantage of this particular situation that has been going on for years.”

The Association of Licensed Manning Agencies (ALMA) has also raised an alarm on the grim forecast of the IMEC as it called on the government to take concrete action to address the issue.

IMEC and ALMA are both lamenting the worsening practice of “ambulance chasing” among local lawyers who specialize in taking on damage or personal disability claim cases, especially those filed by Filipino seafarers who have sustained injuries and persuade these seafarers to make exorbitant disability money claims.

A veritable “corruption ecosystem” involving ambulance chasers, seafarers and unscrupulous arbiters and arbitrators from the National Conciliation and Mediation Board (NCMB) and National Labor Relations Commission (NLRC), both under the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE), and fixers in the judiciary has arisen and brought the extent of disability compensation abuse to sickening levels.

Engineer Nelson Ramirez, president of the United Filipino Seafarers, said that the problem has grown so bad that there have been a number of cases where Filipino seamen have received permanent total disability claims twice.

“You cannot be permanently disabled twice. That can only happen once. You can’t board a ship if you’re permanently disabled,” Ramirez told The STAR in a phone inter-view.

Ramirez, himself an accredited labor arbiter of the NCMB, confirmed the severe corruption of the system, especially at the NCMB.

Stakeholders said that a high 99 percent of seafarer claims filed with the NCMB are awarded.

The Department of Migrant Workers reported that based on NCMB data, the reversed cases involved around P2.57 billion, although this represented only 23 percent of the total monetary awards made by the NCMB from 2018 to 2022.

That amount does not include out-of-court settlements or those filed with the NLRC.

Ambulance chasing and the exploitation of the compensation system are actually a criminal act under the Seafarer Protection Act of 2015 (Republic Act No. 10706).

However, this has not stopped the illegal practice from happening, stakeholders said.

ALMA is said to count 71 manning agencies as members that are responsible for deploying around 174,000 Filipino seafarers at any given time to international vessels.

In 1995, up to 45 percent or almost half of the seamen deployed on oceangoing ships around the world were Filipino seafarers. Just five years earlier or in 1990, 34 percent of seamen on international ships were from the Philippines.

However, starting 2015, the country’s market share has substantially declined to 14 percent for officers and 16 percent for ratings (non-officer skilled seafarers), according to industry data.

Globally, there are 265,680 Filipino seafarers who are deployed at any given time. These seamen are estimated to support about 400,000 families or households here in the country.

In 2021, Filipino seafarers accounted for $6.5 billion or 21 percent out of the $31.4 billion total remittances from overseas Filipino workers.