The Underbelly of Cruising

I’ve been on a cruise ship once, for five days for my job and I didn’t love it. Actually I didn’t even really like it. I love the open water – sailing, boating – but my cruise experience felt like I was trapped in some garish movie theater lobby with the same awful lighting found in most casinos and patterned carpets that only Pucci could find calming. The ports we stopped at weren’t much better, littered as they were with Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville, Señor Frogs, McDonald’s, and Hooters restaurants, no thanks.

Often, I stayed onboard working (in my former life as a publicist), but when I wasn’t on the job, I was observing and intrigued. Noticing the life of the Carnival employee and wondering if this was the way out they’d dreamed of.

It’s no secret that the treatment of entry-level cruise ship employees from developing countries are over-worked and underpaid. The slang term in the industry is sweatships. In my research for this piece, I read numerous articles citing that the average cruise ship employee logs 72 hours in just one week – with just one day scheduled off (which usually doesn’t happen). What I saw while afloat reminded me of the film footage of factory workers from the 1920s – below decks hundreds of workers – mostly from Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America – live in cramped dormitory-style rooms.
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