Cruise Bruise Blog
January 3, 2009
January 3, 2009
Cruise Ship Dirty Tricks Not Limited To Cruise Industry

If you are from the U.S. and called for tech support or information about your loan or credit card account, and you got a person on the other end with a thick Indian (from India) accent, you would likely assume the person was from India. Until recently, that might be a pretty good guess.

What you think, however, if I told you that the person you spoke with was actually on a cruise ship, floating only three miles off the Southern California coast line? Sound crazy?

Crazy like a fox. A company called Sea-Code Inc has found a way to circumvent all the rules of civilized nations, and hire software engineers and programmers to do the job Americans once did, and still portray themselves as an American company, close at hand. While on the surface this sounds like old news, think again.

The San Diego headquarters of Sea-Code are located at SeaCode, Inc.
10401 Roselle St, San Diego, California. The location is near where Interstate 805 and Interstate 5 cross, also near more well-known Sorrento Valley Road. It is not much of an office at all.

The Sea-Code plan was simple. Buy a cruise ship that will house 600 workers from India and Russia, staff it with a crew of 300 to attend to the business of running the hotel and restaurant,  anchor it off the California coast, and call yourself an American company, "bringing jobs back home".

The proposed cruise ship was the MV Carousel. In July 2004 the Carousel was sold to Louis Cruise Lines.  Louis Cruise Lines renamed the ship MV Aquamarine and starting from June 2005 she was used on 7-day cruises around the Mediterranean with Genoa as the starting port.

In April 2006 the ship was chartered for five years to Transocean Tours who renamed her MV Arielle. However, the charter was apparently terminated by early 2008, when the ship returned to Louis fleet and reverted to the name Aquamarine. It would seem the Carousel was off the bargaining table for Sea-Code. But, the owners had indicated they were looking at several possible cruise ships.

The Sea-Code web site says, "SeaCode brings already offshored jobs back to the U.S. and ensures that 90 cents of every dollar from our clients stays in the U.S. instead of flowing to foreign locations."

According to an article written for Forbes Magazine, these workers are paid $1800 a month. The Boston Globe reported that meals, hotel and laundry are provided free of charge. Somehow, I don't see those perks lasting long.

Now, looking at the statement on the Sea-Code web site, for every $100 a client pays them, $90 comes back to the U.S, though the company does not say how. With housing, meals, entertainment, including nightclubs and a casino provided aboard, and work hours sure to be long, it is doubtful the slave labor is coming ashore to spend 90% of their earnings in the U.S. In fact documentation of third world workers who do work in the U.S. or on cruise ships has shown these workers spend as little as possible on themselves, and send all the rest back to their native country to look after parents, spouses and children.

Because the ship is registered in the Bahamas, there are no U.S. regulations to be follow, no pesky H1-B work visa applications, and no U.S. taxes to be paid. It was the evasion of the stiffer H1-B work visa regulations, designed to make it tougher to import workers from India with intent to take away jobs from American software engineers,  that had company founders David Cook and Roger Green intrigued.

H1-B is a specialty-occupation visa status under which a large number of Indian information technology (IT) firms send their employees to the US for on-site project development work, popularly known as body-shopping. The US is the prime export destination for the Indian software industry, with more than 50% of the H1-B visas issued worldwide by the US going to Indian professionals. India is also currently the second-largest source, trailing only Mexico, of legal immigrants to the US.

In 2005, the company was the brain child of Roger Green, a software entrepreneur and David Cook, once a supertanker skipper who spent 15 years hauling crude oil through the world's sea lanes. Cook and Green, who used to be chief information officer at chip-equipment manufacturer Cymer, have already raised an undisclosed amount toward a $10 million ship. Their backer is Barry Shillito, a San Diego angel investor and former assistant secretary of defense.

A third man, Joe Conway has joined the team, and the group is now looking at floating their plan off the Los Angeles coast, instead of San Diego. Conway, who has a background in software development, says he did that repeatedly aboard Navy nuclear subs at an earlier point in his career.

Cook could be the tie to another company using the same address, and suite number that Sea-code uses, to bid on NASA contracts for space communications and domestic defense.

The group claims the personal benefit of being only three miles offshore allows them to bid on multimillion-dollar US software contracts. When they win those contracts, and in the course of negotiating them, companies seeking Sea-Code talents do not have to travel half way around the world, as they do now for off shored workers. Instead, they are only a half hour launch ride from San Diego or Los Angeles to a luxury cruise ship.

Once aboard the cruise ship, potential clients as well as current clients can stay in a luxury suite, dine on gourmet meals, and party the night away with some actual seamen to cater to their needs.

It gets better. With the concept able to skirt American laws, how long before a telescope set up on the balcony of an oceanfront condo will see a sea of cruise ships, some with technology workers and perhaps others with factory workers off the shore of some of the best weather in the world, especially for ships.

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