TODAY, February 23, 2026, marks 20 years since the Maritime Labour Convention was adopted at the International Maritime Organization. It remains unique in its scope and universality as an international labour treaty, setting minimum employment standards for seafarers around the world.
For two decades it has set minimum standards on working hours, accommodation, welfare and repatriation; expanded protections through successive amendments; and become a reference point for contracts, mediation and even litigation. Yet it also faces persistent challenges: major non‑ratifying states, uneven enforcement, gaps in core protections, and growing concerns that governments are tiring of the amendment process.
Despite these flaws, industry leaders argue the MLC’s greatest achievement is accountability, as a shared framework that forces states and companies to define, demonstrate and deliver what it means to protect seafarers.
International Chamber of Shipping secretary-general Thomas Kazakos called the MLC a “landmark international agreement” that has “for two decades protected a largely unseen global workforce that underpins everyday life”.
The MLC’s journey from a loose set of international standards to a globally recognised treaty is somewhat remarkable.
Mark Dickinson is now general secretary of trade union Nautilus, but in the late 1990s he was assistant general secretary of the International Transport Workers’ Federation and played a large hand in collating that set of disparate standards.
The International Labour Organization decided that many of the instruments drawn up throughout the 20th century to protect seafarers were either out of date or poorly ratified, Dickinson explained, so ILO consulted the ICS (and the then International Shipping Federation) and the ITF on which instruments should be kept and which should be removed.
“It was a huge piece of work,” Dickinson said.
Two decades on, shipping has a convention that sets the minimum bar for seafarers’ rights across the globe, ratified by 110 countries that covers nearly 97% of the world’s fleet by tonnage, something Dickinson called a “pretty staggering turnaround”.
Human Rights at Sea president David Hammond said the MLC provides a source document from which all parties over the world can work, informing contracts, mediation, negotiation and even litigation.
“The MLC, in a nutshell, has provided a foundation and anchor point for the rules-based order for upholding maritime labour standards and protections at sea.”
Maximum working hours, minimum standards for accommodation standards and the right to be repatriated all sound like fairly basic rights, but no other industry has them enshrined in an international treaty that signatories are obliged to incorporate into their own legislation.
Recent amendments made in 2022 include enhanced protections against bullying and harassment, provisions of medical care and requirements for appropriately sized PPE.
In April 2025, governments, shipowners and seafarers’ unions agreed amendments that will enter into force in December 2027, including designation of seafarers as key workers and mandatory measures to ensure access to shore leave without a visa or special permit.
But the MLC is not perfect.
While ratified by many nations, there are some notable absentees, such as the US.
The convention is also dogged by a familiar problem for the International Maritime Organization: enforcement.
While obligated to incorporate the clauses of the MLC into their own statute books, there are few legal repercussions for those that do not enforce the convention properly.
Hammond said that unless the convention is enforced, “it’s almost worthless”.
He said the industry was not seeing enough prosecutions by states of bad actors, and when that does occur, arbitration is usually kept behind closed doors.
“So, what you do not therefore have is a lot of public-facing case law and where you can point to company X or owner Y, who was prosecuted because they failed to uphold the requirements under the MLC,” he said.
The UK’s Health and Safety Executive, for example, has seen plenty of business owners handed lengthy prison sentences for transgressions which act as a deterrent for would-be bad actors.
“The biggest issue with the MLC is very few people or entities are ever found culpable.”
A lack of enforcement is not unique to the MLC, Dickinson pointed out.
“There is no convention in the world, in any sphere that you want to throw at me, where you could put your hand on your heart and say everyone is implementing this convention with the same determination,” he told Lloyd’s List.
“But the ILO is unique in having an oversight of states and holding those states to account.
“They don’t have powers of sanction, but they can issue some pretty withering observations about how a state has turned this commitment into legislation domestically, and how then it enforces it as a flag state, or indeed, how it’s going about its responsibilities,” he said.
Aside from this, there are some large gaps in the convention that Dickinson said should be addressed. Despite the MLC stipulating a limit on maximum working hours, that limit is still nearly double what most land-based employees would be expected to work per week.
Accommodation standards set in 2006 were likely formulated in the 1950s and 1960s, Dickinson said. Amendments made should factor in the lifespan of vessels, which is now regularly exceeding 25 years.
Seafarer pensions remain a sticking point of negotiations, Dickinson said, and remain outside the scope of the MLC.
But his biggest worry was legislative fatigue. He sensed that governments were growing tired of having to both agree and then adopt amendments into their domestic law.
The concern he has is that governments begin to stop accepting changes to the convention, and that instead the MLC becomes a tiered agreement, with different nations signed up to different parts.
Flawed as it may be the MLC’s real power lies in the accountability it demands. InterManager secretary‑general Kuba Szymanski says that, despite concerns over ratification, the convention still requires states to deliver on the promises they make.
“Before MLC, everybody could say ‘I care about my seafarers’. But what does that mean?
“Now we know what it means,” Szymanski told Lloyd’s List.
“You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. The wheel is there. Just sign up for it.”
