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Not much money, Oh, but honey, ain't we got fun?
The food is great here, there's never a bill.
We'll stay up late, dear, let's not miss a thrill.
But having fun on a ship sailing in the middle of the ocean requires prosaic essentials
re-creating all of the systems hotels on land take for granted as well as the underpinnings
of the ship: the navigation system, engines, power plant, water filtration and purification
plants, sewage plants, photography plants, laundry and dry-cleaning facilities, kitchen gal-
leys, a morgue, and storage lockers for the 100,000 pounds of food required to feed 3,000
people every day on a cruise. Also hidden from view are the below-sea-level accommoda-
tions for the 1,200 crew members.
These fun ships grew ever larger to incorporate all the services necessary to run a mini-
ature town, becoming megaships with space for elaborate playthings like the skating rinks
and climbing walls. And the passengers kept coming.
The jingle promising fun remains the basic appeal of a vacation cruise, along with that
inexpensive ticket price. Those bargain prices are possible because of Arison's second in-
novation—avoiding American laws and regulations.
It is no anomaly that cruises singularly turned a profit in the recent Great Recession
of 2008. While Las Vegas and its casinos suffered and the airline industry went into the
doldrums, the cruises were the financial rock star of the tourism industry, remaining the
most profitable sector of tourism.
One key is the very cheap wages cruise ships pay.
In the nineteenth century, British fishermen rebelled against their government's restric-
tions on how many fish they could catch. They turned to an obscure maritime practice
known as flying the flag of convenience. They pulled down their Union Jack flags and re-
gistered their boats in Norway and even in France, their perennial competitor, flying their
flags, escaping the British limits and fishing as much as they wished.
After World War II, when the American shipping industry was hobbling back to life,
American companies grabbed on to that same antiquated practice of flying foreign flags
and registering in foreign lands. They saw it as a lifeline for becoming competitive again
not by avoiding fishing limits but by circumventing American minimum wages, which
meant paying their sailors far less money. Under strong pressure from the shipping industry
and its friends, the U.S. Congress upheld the legality of foreign registration and flying flags
of convenience.
Former Secretary of State Edward Stettinius helped put this new system into play by
assisting the African nation of Liberia in setting up a ship registry program in 1948. The
offices were in New York, not in Monrovia, the Liberian capital, to make it easy for Amer-
ican ships to register as Liberian. Another office was added later in the Washington sub-
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