THE global shipping industry is notorious for its resistance to regulation and oversight — as demonstrated by the large number of ship owners registering their vessels with “flags of convenience.”

But there’s one aspect of shipping operations that’s bucking the anti-regulation trend, and that’s cabotage.

Broadly speaking, cabotage means the carriage of goods between ports in the same country, and cabotage laws often reserve jobs on these routes for domestic seafarers and home-registered vessels.  

More than 100 nation states, covering the vast majority of the world’s coastline, have enacted and enforced cabotage laws or equivalent protections to support domestic shipping, jobs and resilience.

Yet the UK is not one of these states. There are very few laws here to support domestic shipping, and at Nautilus International we are concerned about how this is affecting the country’s maritime workforce.

Just over 24,500 UK seafarers are active at sea today — a very modest number compared with the past — and this long-term decline threatens the sustainability of maritime skills and coastal communities.

That’s why we’re proposing a motion at this year’s TUC Congress arguing that cabotage laws and linked domestic employment measures can rebuild maritime jobs, strengthen supply chains and deliver community wealth-building in coastal areas.

We’ll be calling on the TUC to back Nautilus International and other maritime trade unions in our mission to get cabotage legislation or equivalent measures introduced in the UK.

We’re also pressing for action against offshore employment models that undercut labour standards.

And we need a rethink about the way our sector is viewed by political leaders. It’s time for the government to do more to promote investment in maritime skills and coastal careers. It’s easy to overlook workers who are often “out of sight, out of mind,” but the UK cannot afford to do this when 90 per cent of the nation’s goods are transported by sea.

Another major issue is national security and resilience. A government that neglects its Merchant Navy is a government storing up trouble for the future. If we allow the UK merchant fleet to decline, we lose the British vessels that bring food, fuel and pharmaceuticals to these shores in times when we can’t rely on the open market.

British merchant vessels can also be requisitioned if necessary to support the Royal Navy in times of conflict.

So why hasn’t the UK already backed its Merchant Navy and coastal communities by joining those 100-plus coastal states that have some kind of cabotage legislation?

It’s partly because of a long and shameful history of legislators giving in to pressure from the maritime business lobby to ignore seafarers’ rights.

Even in the 21st century, there was for many years a legal loophole stating that the National Minimum Wage only applied on land, not in UK waters.

We fought that as a union and got it changed, and we also fought for the seafarers’ rights that are now enshrined in the Employment Rights Act 2025.

Another issue is that legislators can be wary of seeming “protectionist” — concerned that they will be seen as doing something damaging to the country’s free market economy.

But if these legislators knew how many other successful countries had cabotage laws, this could be a game-changer, and that’s why we’re drawing attention to the seminal report Cabotage Laws of the World 2025 by the UN-backed research organisation Seafarers’ Rights International (available at www.seafarersrights.org).

We’ve already started to step up our campaign for cabotage laws at Nautilus International, and we’re confident that the union movement will support us. We hope that everyone reading this article will get behind us too.

It’s time for the UK take a proper look at cabotage and do the right thing by its seafarers and coastal communities.

Sascha Meijer is general secretary of Nautilus International.