NTSB via AP
In this image from video released by the National Transportation Safety Board, the container ship Dali is stuck under part of the structure of the Francis Scott Key Bridge after the ship hit the bridge, March 26, 2024, in Baltimore.
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.
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. Until the free trade ideology took over, the US had an active program of promoting and subsidizing construction of merchant shipping. In 1975, for example, 25 new ocean-going merchant ships were delivered and there were 83 more on order. 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.
Note: An earlier version of this story overestimated the amount of U.S. shipbuilding in the 1970s. It has now been corrected. We regret the error.
