Minimum age for seafarers and the night work ban under 18 (MLC Regulation 1.1)

Say a maritime high school senior joins the ship as a cadet. If the cadet is 17, what can and cannot be assigned on board, and can the cadet stand the midnight to 4 a.m. watch. MLC, 2006 Regulation 1.1 and Standard A1.1 answer in age brackets. There are two brackets: 16 and 18.

Under 16 there is no exception clause to fall back on

1. The employment, engagement or work on board a ship of any person under the age of 16 shall be prohibited.

Employment, engagement and work are all prohibited. The three words sit side by side to close off any escape through the form of the contract. An unpaid cadetship, a family member taken along: if the person works on the ship, it is work on board a ship.

No exception is attached to this bracket. The night work exception that follows attaches only to the 18 bracket.

For anyone under 18, night runs at least nine hours

2. Night work of seafarers under the age of 18 shall be prohibited. For the purposes of this Standard, “night” shall be defined in accordance with national law and practice. It shall cover a period of at least nine hours starting no later than midnight and ending no earlier than 5 a.m.

National law and practice define night. The provision then puts a floor under that definition. It has to run nine hours or more, it cannot start later than midnight, and it cannot end earlier than 5 a.m.

Overlay the three conditions and a window falls inside night under any national definition: midnight to 5 a.m. The start cannot slide past midnight and the end cannot be pulled in before 5 a.m., so those five hours survive every definition. Filling out the nine hours adds four more hours on either side, and where those four hours go is what the flag State actually decides.

The midnight to 4 a.m. watch sits in the middle of those five hours. Putting a cadet under 18 on it runs into the provision unless an exception has been granted.

The exception is opened by the competent authority, not by the company

3. An exception to strict compliance with the night work restriction may be made by the competent authority when:

The body that makes the exception is the competent authority. Not the company, not the master. And the grounds are limited to two.

Ground	What the provision requires
(a) effective training in accordance with established programmes and schedules would be impaired	The programme and schedule have to exist first
(b) the specific nature of the duty or a recognized training programme requires night duty	Consultation with the shipowners’ and seafarers’ organizations, then a determination by the authority that the work will not be detrimental to health or well-being

Consultation and a determination are conditions on (b) and not on (a). In exchange, (a) presumes that training is in fact being impaired, so it cannot be relied on where no cadet programme was drawn up before the person joined. Either way this is not something that can be settled on board on the day.

The list of work barred to under 18s is written by the flag State

4. The employment, engagement or work of seafarers under the age of 18 shall be prohibited where the work is likely to jeopardize their health or safety.

The provision sets the test and hands off the list. Which work falls inside it is determined by national laws or regulations or by the competent authority, after consultation with the shipowners’ and seafarers’ organizations concerned, in accordance with relevant international standards.

What that structure means in practice is one thing. The restriction does not disappear because the flag State has not published a list. The prohibition itself is in the Convention text, and the list is the instrument that gives it shape. Where there is no list, the company is the one reading the relevant international standards.

Clearing the age brackets is not enough without safety training

Age is only one threshold. Regulation 1.3 sets a second one.

2. Seafarers shall not be permitted to work on a ship unless they have successfully completed training for personal safety on board ship.

Without having successfully completed training for personal safety on board ship, a seafarer may not work on the ship. Regulation 1.3 paragraph 3 then treats training and certification under the mandatory instruments adopted by IMO as meeting that requirement. In practice the STCW basic safety training certificate fills the slot.

A cadet meets the whole combination at once. Whether the person is over 16, whether the watch falls in night hours if the person is under 18, and whether the basic safety training certificate was issued before joining. The three come from different provisions, so checking one leaves the other two open.

Worth confirming

The passages above come from printed pages 17 and 19 of the consolidated MLC, 2006 (including the 2022 amendments). Standard A1.1 is mandatory, but the exact clock hours of night, the list of work barred to under 18s, and the procedure for granting a night work exception are all filled in by flag State law. What the flag State calls night, whether the list of prohibited work has been published, and where an exception is applied for are where the actual judgement starts.