Who bears seafarer recruitment fees and the three exceptions (MLC Regulation 1.4)

If a seafarer paid to get a berth, where did the money go and who has to give it back. MLC, 2006 Regulation 1.4 and Standard A1.4 handle that question as a question about the direction money moves. There is one axis to read the provisions on. Cost may not flow toward the seafarer, and exactly three items are explicitly opened up.

The starting point is that the route to employment is free of charge

1. All seafarers shall have access to an efficient, adequate and accountable system for finding employment on board ship without charge to the seafarer.

without charge to the seafarer sits in the Regulation itself. This is not a requirement that placement services run well; it is a requirement that the seafarer pay nothing to use the route. Standard A1.4 then turns the sentence into something enforceable.

The seafarer may bear three costs, and a visa is not one of them

(b) require that no fees or other charges for seafarer recruitment or placement or for providing employment to seafarers are borne directly or indirectly, in whole or in part, by the seafarer, other than the cost of the seafarer obtaining a national statutory medical certificate, the national seafarer’s book and a passport or other similar personal travel documents, not including, however, the cost of visas, which shall be borne by the shipowner; and

A prohibition, an exception and an exception to the exception are stacked inside one sentence. Unpacked:

Item	Who bears it
Recruitment or placement fees, charges for providing employment	Not the seafarer
National statutory medical certificate	The seafarer may bear it
National seafarer’s book	The seafarer may bear it
Passport or other similar personal travel documents	The seafarer may bear it
Visa costs	The shipowner

A visa looks like it would sit inside the travel document exception, and the provision pulls it back out on the spot: not including, however, the cost of visas. Having pulled it out, the sentence then names who pays. The shipowner. The passport falls to the seafarer and the visa to the shipowner, and the split happens inside a single line.

Direct or indirect, in whole or in part, all closed

The words that set the reach of the prohibition are directly or indirectly, in whole or in part. All four branches are shut because workarounds get built out of contract structure. A service that does not invoice the seafarer but has it deducted from the first month’s wages, or takes it under another name such as a training fee or a document handling fee, or takes only half of it, is inside this phrase.

The ban on lists that block employment sits in the same paragraph

(a) prohibit seafarer recruitment and placement services from using means, mechanisms or lists intended to prevent or deter seafarers from gaining employment for which they are qualified;

This prohibition sits immediately before the fee provision. It bans means, mechanisms and lists intended to prevent or deter qualified seafarers from gaining employment. Because deter is in there, nobody has to prove that employment was actually blocked. Intent to discourage is enough.

Insurance has to cover the seafarer’s loss when the service or the shipowner fails

(vi) establish a system of protection, by way of insurance or an equivalent appropriate measure, to compensate seafarers for monetary loss that they may incur as a result of the failure of a recruitment and placement service or the relevant shipowner under the seafarers’ employment agreement to meet its obligations to them, and ensure that seafarers are informed, prior to or in the process of engagement, of their rights under that system.

What the protection covers is not only the failure of the service. The provision writes in monetary loss arising from the failure of the service or the relevant shipowner to meet its obligations under the seafarers’ employment agreement. And seafarers have to be informed of their rights under that system before or during engagement. A system nobody told the seafarer about does not meet what the provision asks for.

The rest of the same subparagraph is the service’s work as well.

• Keep an up-to-date register of seafarers placed, available for inspection by the competent authority.
• Let seafarers examine their employment agreements before and after signing.
• Verify that they are qualified and hold the documents the job needs.
• Make sure, as far as practicable, that the shipowner has the means to keep them from being stranded in a foreign port.
• Examine and respond to complaints, and advise the competent authority of any that stay unresolved.

Using a service outside the Convention puts the verification on the shipowner

9. Each Member which has ratified this Convention shall require that shipowners of ships that fly its flag, who use seafarer recruitment and placement services based in countries or territories in which this Convention does not apply, ensure, as far as practicable, that those services meet the requirements of this Standard.

The axis turns here. The earlier provisions ask the country where the service sits to regulate the service. Paragraph 9 asks the shipowner to verify when that country does not apply the Convention. Regulation 1.4 paragraph 3 carries the same content in the Regulation text.

What that means in practice is plain. How much the company has to verify changes with the country the crew comes from. And paragraph 10 states that nothing in the Standard is to be understood as diminishing the obligations of shipowners or of a flag State. Having handed the work to a service is not a defence.

Worth confirming

The passages above come from printed pages 20 and 21 of the consolidated MLC, 2006 (including the 2022 amendments). Standard A1.4 is mandatory, but the shape of the licensing or certification system and how it is supervised are set by the law of the country where the service sits. Which country the service is in, whether that country is a party to the Convention, and which row of the table above the money paid before joining falls into are where the actual judgement starts.