Our “People of the Sea”

By Brady Eviota
Bern-Switzerland
May 2, 2018




BERN, Switzerland  –  A luxury ship cruise is associated with pleasure and fun and merrymaking. And this month we were on a ship of the Costa Crociere S.p.A., an Italian cruise company, do to just that.



We certainly enjoyed the week-long cruise, stuffing ourselves on the buffet meals and snacks that was available at Deck Number 9, the “food deck””, almost 24/7. We enjoyed the long dinners offering exquisite Italian food and wines prepared by the ship’s cooks, went to the disco almost nightly, and treated ourselves to the nightly shows featuring world-class artists and performers brought onboard by the company.

This was the second cruise for my wife Theresa and I, the first one in 2015 on an MSC Cruises ship also in the Mediterranean. Bu this trip was different, because we encountered daily other Filipinos and experienced close-hand their daily lives and struggles.

Of the ship’s 1,100 crew, about 80% were Filipino, working as room stewards, waiters or busboys, as so-called entertainment “animators”,  as cooks, as security or offshore personnel, or as deck maintenance crews. They were everywhere -- in the business shops or in the casino, in the bars and restaurants, on the top decks or the lower decks, greeting us with their smiles and “kumusta po kayo!” when they saw that we were Filipinos.

They offered us the goods during the whole trip. “Ano pong kailangan ninyo? Ako po ang bahala sa inyo,” was the reassuring refrain we got when meeting a Filipino crew member. We got extra food portions, a few drinks gratis, discounts at the spa, even a bottle of champagne offered spontaneously over the bar so that a Filipina member of our group could celebrate her birthday.



Adobo at sinigang

When we joked that we wanted Filipino food like adobo or sinigang, our Filipino waiters said it could be arranged, “pwedeng ayusin, sir”. No was never their answer, although we reassured them that it was the Italian delicacies we were after in the dinner menu. And we got stuffed— starting out with the carpaccio,  a dish of raw meat or fish thinly sliced or pounded thin and served with lemon, olive oil, salt and ground pepper. Then we had the pasta or the various kinds of the risotto, a rich and creamy rice dish of the Italians. We tried once a risotto nero, undaunted by its black color, and found the squid cuts in their ink sauce very tasty. For the main menu, we had  the osso buco, a classic Milanese dish of braised veal shanks in a hearty wine- and vegetable-based sauce. I was even lucky to find and try wild pig on the dinner menu (the meat was cooked very tender and with virtually no gamey smell, being smothered with spices and sauces.) 

Our kababayans were happy to serve us, saying that they often had a Filipino couple or two as passengers, but never this big a group (we were 20 Filipinos in all).

They gave us their best service, not only in the nightly dinners but down to the housekeeping. We saw how trained and motivated they were, and how high the work standards were. And they gave more. Our Filipino waiters gave us a treat on Italian night, offering a dance performance of “Volare”, the beloved Italian classic, to the delight of all the diners.

Then they next danced to the hit song “Sofia” by the Spanish singer-songwriter Álvaro Soler. “Sofia” was released in 2016 and was big in Italy, going seven times platinum in Italy.  The waiter’s dance brought the house down. Or rather, it brought the dinner crowd composed mostly of Italians to its feet. 

Gente di mare

And on the last night, Costa showed for us “Gente di Mare” or “people of the Sea”, a video production honoring the crew of the ship.

"Gente di mare" was the Italian entry in the Eurovision Song Contest 1987, performed in Italian by Umberto Tozzi & Raf. In this highly popular song, the singers describe themselves as "people of the plain" who feel they are prisoners of the city, and contrast it with the freedom of the "people of the sea".

There were Filipinos on almost every clip on the video, and I realized with a jolt how our ship and many others on the high seas all over the world were kept afloat by the service and dedication of their Filipino crew. “Lulubog ang Costa pag umalis ang mga Pilipino dito,” was how one bartender put the matter squarely.

But with the good things we saw also came the painful truths. The crew was on 8 month-long contracts, but they received no pay on the 2 to 3 months that they were on vacation. And they said there was no assurance of the next contract.

They worked long shifts of 10 up to 12 hours, with no days off. In Corfu, we met a group of Indonesian crew members who said their shore leave was only 3 to 4  hours, just enough to relax and buy personal items and to find local wifi and receive or send off  important messages to their families.  (To our dismay, we learned that the crew had to pay for wifi onboard, just like the passengers!)

Onboard, it seemed like the  so-called “animators”, the crew that pumped up the party people, were always at the next entertainment event. “Lagare” was how the Filipinos called it, jumping from event to event.

I met a young Filipino on his third year cleaning the top deck of the  294-meter long (or about 900 feet) ship early one morning. He said he had started at 5 a.m. and would finish his shift only six hours later. And in winter?, I asked. “Mahirap nga pag winter, ser, malamig,” was his reply.

Our steward took care of housekeeping 24 rooms on our deck. He was one of the oldies, those who had worked on ships for ten years or more. He was saving money for a daughter who was starting medicine in a private school in Manila. His son had a rare nervous syndrome which resulted  in a stroke when he was aged 5;  he survived, but he had not developed as well as the others. His wife managed a computer shop that he had opened in Manila.



As we were leaving our cabin on departure day, he told us, “Mamaya sir, makikita nyo akong mag-kandarapa,” He had only a few hours to clean the vacated cabins and get them ready in time for the next passengers arriving for the next tour.

Costa Crociere crew had it better  maybe a decade or two ago. They had higher pay and better work conditions then. In the year 2000, Carnival Corporation & plc, a Miami, Florida-based US cruise company, bought and took over the Costa Crociere.

Carnival is listed as the world's largest travel leisure company, with a combined fleet of over 100 vessels across 10 cruise line brands. Its CEO, Micky Arison, is a millionaire who also owns the NBA team the Miami Heat.

The tragedy

But on January 2012, the Costa Concordia, then the largest Italian cruise ship,  struck a rock in the Tyrrhenian Sea just off a small Italian island. The disaster left 32 dead among the 3,229 passengers and 1,023 crew who were onboard that time. More significantly, the accident affected bookings on the entire Costa fleet.

(Incidentally, the Filipino crew on that ship helped save many lives during the six-hour evacuation of the ship. My source says the Filipinos kept their wits and formed human chains that allowed most of the 3,229 passengers and 1,023 crew known to have been aboard  to pass to safety.)

But the bad publicity and estimated losses  of over USD 400 million -- aside from USD 5 billion from lost shares -- from the Costa Concordia sinking, coupled with new management regulations, resulted in changes, such as the lowering of take home pay, multi-tasking for the crew and generally more difficult conditions.

Carnival chief executive Micky Arison said in 2013: "As a result of the Costa Concordia tragedy in January, the past year has been the most challenging in our company's history."

A crew member I asked says his take-home pay now is only a thousand dollars, and could even go lower in the future.

There is general agreement among the crew members we were able to talk to that the best times are over for ship crews. 

Others feel that Magsaysay Maritime Corporation or MMC, the Philippine agent which schools and trains prospective seamen and exclusively supplies human resources for the ships of the Costa Crociere, could have made a better deal for their Filipino workers.

In 2014, Marlon R. Rono, Magsaysay Maritime Corp. (MMC) president, was quoted as saying that Filipino crew members are very much in demand onboard “because of their proverbial hospitality and quality service.”

Tips are good

During our trip, the Filipinos readily take the cash tips that are offered to them. There is none of the coyish “huwag na po, hindi po kelangan ang tip” attitude that is typical of us. The times are hard, and tips augment their decreasing pay.

For some, the cost of leaving their families has been high. Joey (not his real name), a seaman from Bohol, narrated that during his trips, his wife met someone else and cheated him. “Na-tokhang man siya sa dalan, ser,” was how he described his marital misfortune. When he learned about this indiscretion, Joey and his wife had to separate.

Others who are consider old-timers among the crew narrated that their short 2-month vacations in between their trips are not enough to reunite the family bond. They feel that their children are already strangers to them, and that their time with their wives often felt like formal liaisons, and not an intimate reunion with partners.

The crew members are also always careful about their work. Hierarchies and rankings on the ship are strictly enforced. Onboard, there is competition to rise above the others and be recognized by their superiors, and there are intrigues and backbiting that are maybe inherent in working in such close quarters.

In the crew that we met, there was only one Filipino we considered to be among middle-management, a chef de service who presided over the nightly dinners. But never one among the officers.

A source also says there are cases of unscrupulous passengers intentionally damaging cabin property or reporting the theft and loss of their belongings, to take advantage of a reported management policy to offer a refund or a fare discount to appease the troubled client.

But the unfortunate victim of this scam is the room steward, who faces unwarranted searches of his person and belongings and potential blacklisting if he unable to prove his innocence.

Some Filipinos feel the government could help the so-called “seafarers” by lobbying for them the same benefit packages as that of land-based overseas workers.  These would include better security of tenure and conditions for employment; for regular work contracts as against contract-based work; regulations on holidays and paid annual leave; health and social security benefits provided by the shipowner; and assurances to repatriation if needed.

Such measures could help our own “people of the sea”, who deserve no less credit as the OFWs who have secure land under their footing. 

(Note: This article was published originally in the  Mindanews website (www.mindanews.com) on 24 April 2018. The writer Brady Eviota is from Surigao city and now resides in Bern, Switzerland. He writes a column for Mindanews called “Alpside Downed.”)