We need a just transition for workers in the transport sector – workers that will be key to our recovery from Covid and to any attempts to tackle the climate emergency.
Stranded seafarers and port workers are facing physical and mental exhaustion, trapped on shipboard since the pandemic began. They do not have access to shore leave; some have been denied emergency medical treatment.
The Uganda transport workers strategy for organising informal economy workers was based on understanding that these workers are often already organised, not within unions, but through credit and savings cooperatives, self-help groups, community-based organisations and associations.
The systematic and deliberate withholding of wages of seafarers working on the high seas thousands of miles from home effectively amounts to a form of compulsion requiring workers to remain in abusive working and living conditions.
Spread the word