Stuck at sea for years, a sailor’s plight highlights a surge in shipowner abandonment

Abdul Nasser Saleh says he rarely got a good night’s sleep during the near-decade he spent working without pay on a cargo ship abandoned by its owner at ports along the Red Sea.

By night, he tossed and turned in his bunk on the aging Al-Maha, he said, thinking of the unpaid wages he feared he’d never get if he left the ship. By day he paced the deck, stuck for the last two years in the seaport of Jeddah, unable to set foot on land because of Saudi Arabia’s strict immigration laws.

Leaving at last felt like returning to his “center of gravity,” he said.

Saleh’s plight is part of a global problem that shows no signs of abating. The United Nations has logged an increasing number of crew members abandoned by shipowners, leaving sailors aboard months and sometimes years without pay. More than 2,000 seafarers on some 150 ships were abandoned last year.

The number of cases is at its highest since the U.N.’s labor and maritime organizations began tracking abandonments 20 years ago, spiking during the global pandemic and continuing to rise as inflation and logistical bottlenecks increased costs for shipowners. Cases have touched all parts of the globe, with workers abandoned on a fish factory ship in Angola, stranded on an icebreaker in the Netherlands and left without food or fuel in Istanbul.

Yet the nations that register these ships and are required by treaty to assist abandoned seafarers sometimes fail to get involved in the cases at all. Tanzania, which registered the ship where Saleh was abandoned, never acted on his case or even responded to emails, said Mohamed Arrachedi, a union organizer who worked on Saleh’s case.

Shipowners often abandon crew members when they are hit by rising fuel costs, debt or unexpected repairs they