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Health and Safety

Health and Safety have always been one of the main issues that generate moral dilemmas. While generally, organizations know what is good for their employees or not, when we delve into the specific, the guideline for Health and Safety becomes more difficult to define. Such vagueness can be a fertile ground for ethical dilemmas since, as established in previous blogs, a direct, holistic and genuine is more preferable for a safe workplace.

However, specific jobs which are more prone to hazardous conditions, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, would require improvements in the current Health and Safety protocols of organizations, improvements that are difficult to achieve due to the unprecedented conditions presented by the pandemic. For example, those working in sea shipping have suffered considerably due to the lack of adequate and universal Health and Safety protocols.

Since we have established that Health, when mentioned, consists of both mental health and physical health. In the case of sailors in international trade routes, I will try to discuss both of these aspects of health and the moral dilemma of this case.

As our global supply-chain is heavily dependent on the international sea routes, maritime workers have been working tirelessly despite the pandemic. However, due to different H&S protocols of different governments, these international ships and their crew have had a lot of difficulties finding a harbor or a port that accept them, resulting in thousands of seafarers stranded at sea. In an article by The Washington Post, at least 200,000 crew members are stuck at sea, unable to reach mainland (Telford and Bogage, 2021). These crew members are especially vulnerable to medical issue. There have been cases where crew members are suspected to be contracted with the coronavirus and did not receive proper medical care, as in the case of Captain Dan Sandu (Hinshaw et al, 2021) and Angelo Capurro (Rebane and Borghese, 2021) being the most typical case of when these medical issue went wrong. Apart from physical health concern, such as the lack of food, water and medical supplies, these workers also suffer heavily from social isolation. In some cases, crew members would have to wait 6 months to be able to find a country that would accept their vessel and allow crew change.

While the situation is unfortunate, the solution is still not clear for organizations and authorities. While the ethical decision would be to accept these crew members, in doing so, the authorities may risk spread the coronavirus to the workers at these port, and consequently, their citizens. Then, would such decisions be considered ethical by the public? The moral dilemma does not only apply to the authorities, but also the owner and management of these vessels as well. If the crew decided to harbor, there is also the risk of contracting COVID-19 from the citizens of the host countries. If not, both their physical and mental health will suffer due to the lack of services/supplies and social isolation, respectively.

Therefore, a suitable Health and Safety protocol is in dire need under these circumstances. However, in order to achieve this, policy makers as well as management will have to face moral dilemmas that are not easy to handle.