A WEB page enabling workers to gain rapid access to essential information about their health and safety rights and responsibilities has been set up by the Health and Safety Executive.

The "workers’ webpage" http://www.hse.gov.uk/ workers
- covers the roles and responsibilities of employers and employees, as well as issues such as ‘whistle-blowing’ and reporting accidents.

EDITORIAL

Increasing piracy and terrorist attacks are reportedly hitting the maritime industry, from the coast of troubled Somalia to the South China Sea and the Strait of Malacca to the islands in southern Philippines.

Alert has been raised by industry and labor groups to warn commercial shipping to steer clear of those parts. It would seem that the world had been wrapped in so much ethnic and religious anger as to put crew and passengers of cruise ships in a state of alarm over the safety of sea travel and commerce.

Apart from what government and their defense and police agencies agree to do either individually or jointly with countries willing to fund anti-terrorist initiatives, we are left wondering how else can we move without feeling insecure.

In malls and ship and air terminals, and rail and bus stations, we have already surrendered our right against involuntary searches. We have also grown suspicious of those who seem out there to create panic and destruction. We have become praning (paranoid) to use the current lingo, and we have become resigned to any possibility anywhere we may be.

Those who have high-risk jobs have just had a premium on more threats to their lives. Seafarers who have to count on each other working on the ship to keep the boat afloat and running, not only have to ensure engine running condition and safe navigation, they also need to prepare for greater security uncertainty.

If one were looking for a widow-making machine, then it’s the ship with all its vulnerabilities to destructive natural and man-made forces.

Preparedness drills do help as they probably have been shown in the great recent escape of the cruise ship Seabourne on the coast of east Africa. But elsewhere, only tempered character can give the courage to Noel Soreta to risk his own life in order to save three foreign fishermen in mid-storm in mid-sea.

Where we Filipinos raise high the national flag in doing a good turn at great personal peril and get some recognition for it, we wonder how other seafarers such as those stranded in Bahrain remain unsupplied with food and other necessities and one allegedly murdered in Taiwan remain unburied for months now.

Facing up to the risks of sea jobs and putting one’s fortunes into the hands of the unknown indeed make the difference between seafaring and other income sources.

That explains how and why every homecoming marino (and not marinero, as what  the ABS-CBN’s “The Correspondents” special report on seafarers insists) to his family and barangay is testimony to all that heroism is the prize, not the price, of sailing.

Keeping the terror threat hanging like the sword of Damocles on the fate of the state can desert the wits of the wise, but putting one’s own life on the line every time a seafarer signs his contract commits himself to the test of heroism unless proven otherwise.

On a ship, an error is itself the agent of terror.

You can now join or start any discussion on seafarer's issues anytime or anywhere you are with