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**MARCH 29, 2024**
On the Prospect website
Chamber Takes an L on Egregious Judge Shopping
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce filed suit against the CFPB's credit
card rule in a judicial district that contains no credit card companies.
BY DAVID DAYEN
Senators' Latest Attempt to Enrich Big Pharma Must Not Prevail
Patents are meant to encourage actual innovation, not monster
corporate profits. BY ALEX MOSS & TIMI IWAYEMI
[link removed]
Handmaids of the Patriarchy
Republicans offer a lesson in how not to win women back to their
party. BY FRANCESCA FIORENTINI
Kuttner on TAP
****
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**** Bridge to the Bottom: Global Deregulation
of Shipping
The collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge is directly tied to the use
of globalization to undermine national standards of safety and quality.
Like much of global shipping, the MV
**Dali**, which took down the Key Bridge, is a flag-of-convenience ship,
with fractured responsibility for its conditions. It was chartered by
the Danish shipping Giant Maersk, operated by Synergy Marine Group, and
registered in Singapore. The ship's crew is made up of 22 foreign
workers from India
. The boat is
owned by yet another company, Grace Ocean Private Ltd.
After the attacks of 9/11, and worries that terrorist weapons of mass
destruction could be hidden in shipping containers, the U.S. and other
nations went all out to create a global regime of inspection,
identification, and clearing for the contents of containers
.
But nothing comparable was done to ensure the safety of container ships.
A ship like the
**Dali** is only as good as the inspection regime of the nation where it
is registered, which is to say not very good. That is the whole appeal
of flags of convenience-to operate ships on the cheap.
If the U.S. chose, we could require all such ships that enter American
waters to be certified as meeting safety standards. The U.S. could
organize other nations to create an international safety and inspection
regime.
We still don't know exactly what mechanical defects caused the
**Dali** to lose power and slam into the Francis Scott Key Bridge. We do
know that the ship had prior mishaps.
In 2016, it collided with the berth at the container terminal in
Antwerp, causing significant damage to the ship and closing the terminal
for repairs. Neither Maersk nor the ship's owners at the time, a Greek
company called Oceanbulk Maritime, were held accountable.
[link removed]
It's the same story with labor standards. Standards for American
seafarers are well regulated, and union contracts add to the quality.
There are no such standards for workers on flag-of-convenience crews.
The maritime unions of the U.S. and other Western nations have organized
a model contract
with decent labor standards and have used the pressure of boycotts to
enlist some international shippers (but far from a majority) to sign on.
Maryland law does require that all pilots of ships going through
Baltimore Harbor be certified and licensed. Local captains pilot ships
through the harbor until they get out to sea. But we have no idea what
the crew did or did not do, to keep the
**Dali** shipshape while it was at sea.
Another dimension of globalization is intensified immigration, both
documented and undocumented. The workers who were on the Key Bridge, six
of whom died, were immigrants. There is no evidence that they did their
jobs poorly. Mainly, they were exploited by the contractor.
The federal Davis-Bacon Act requires prevailing wages to be paid on
public construction contracts. In practice, that has been interpreted to
mean union wages and union contractors. Maryland has its own state
Davis-Bacon Act
, and so
does Baltimore County. But Brawner Builders, which got the contract, is
a non-union contractor. It should not have received this contract at
all.
Union sources tell me that misclassification is rampant in this kind of
work, and that it's likely that these workers were being paid as
independent contractors. That's doubly illegal.
The Labor Department should be doing better at enforcement of
Davis-Bacon and misclassification, and the Department of Transportation
should bar contractors who violate the law. Enforcement lapses of laws
on the books ended in one more tragic race to the bottom, literally.
One last piece of the story is the obliteration of the U.S. shipbuilding
industry. As recently as the 1970s, the American shipbuilding industry
was producing over 100 major merchant ships every year. Those ships were
built to high standards. That industry is now gone, another victim of
race-to-the-bottom globalization. The world's top producer is now
China.
United Steelworkers president David McCall points out that shipbuilding
uses a lot of steel
. With
revival of a domestic industry, "If we could run capacity for more ships
and the infrastructure to support them, it would create many more jobs
which in turn would create more profitable facilities."
Add it all up and the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge is one
more needless casualty of the use of rampant globalization to undermine
safety and labor standards. It doesn't have to be that way.
~ ROBERT KUTTNER
Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter
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