Nearly, a decade spanning from 1991 to 2001, Ross Klein has been on 40 cruises for almost 40 days a year. He shares his authentic experience on cruise ships and the impact it has created on him. What seems to be a glossy and exhilarating form of travel has a dark side which is unknown to the outside world. Corporate Crime Reporter’s interview with Klein throws light on lot of hidden facts in cruise lines world. This is an excerpt from the interview with Klein published in Corporate Crime Reporter.
Klein, a professor of social work at Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada. He began to notice the dark side of the cruise industry ranging from sexual assaults, illegal pollution of the oceans and the poor pay to workers.
He has a range of books to his credit which deals with the dark side of the cruise lines. They are
- Paradise Lost at Sea: Rethinking Cruise Vacations (Fernwood Books, 2008),
- Cruise Ship Squeeze: The New Pirates of the Seven Seas (New Society Publishers, 2005),
- Cruise Ship Blues: The Underside of the Cruise Industry (New Society Publishers, 2002),
- and Death by Chocolate: What You Must Know Before Taking a Cruise (Breakwater Books, 2001).
He has written many articles in recent years, has testified before the U.S. Senate.
On his website – cruisejunkie.com – Klein keeps track of illnesses and outbreaks, people overboard and deaths, pollution and environmental violations and fines, gastrointestinal illnesses and accident reports.
A range of serious issues highlighted by Klein are as follows:
- The largest problem is that regulations that are not being enforced. And part of the enforcement is that there is no monitoring taking place.
- The cruise ship companies have been indicted and convicted a number of times for polluting the oceans.
- But it’s not taken seriously. For example, if a cruise ship is fined $40 million, they don’t correct their mistakes. And then they go back and commit another 800 offenses and fined another $20 million.
- People are fifty percent more likely to be assaulted on a cruise ship than on land in Canada on some cruise lines.
- Thirty four percent of the victims are children.
- Average working duration is 11 hours per day but many workers work much more than that.
- The most demeaning jobs are filled by people from Southeast Asia, the Philippines, parts of the Grenadines.
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Source: Corporate Crime Reporter
