The Maritime Labour Convention 2006: An Instrument to Improve Social Responsibility in the Cruise Industry

This paper discusses whether the Maritime Labour Convention (MLC) adopted by the International Labour Organization (ILO) in 2006 is an effective instrument to improve social responsibility in the cruise industry. The content of the MLC is not at all new for the shipping and cruise corporations, but the mechanism of filling regulatory gaps in the past is a significant innovation. It enables a procedural fairness within a process of enforcing well-known regulations, which can lead to a socially more responsible performance in the cruise sector. Compared to the situation nowadays, seafarers will be better off. This implies that cruise corporations find solutions to deal with the MLC-induced additional labour cost that do not negatively affect the work-load or wages of the seafarers. The MLC consolidates existing maritime regulations and translates them into (partially) binding law. Complying with the law is non-voluntary and cannot be understood as (voluntary) socially responsible behaviour. As MLC will become a norm, i.e. a law, its compliance excludes the option of ‘social responsibility’. Only if we assume a social ‘learning curve’ determined by a collective capability to transform norms into intrinsic social values will the compliance with MLC’s regulations lead to more social responsibility in the future.