My grandparents loved taking cruises. Ironically, my grandfather, a photographer, grew up in a working class family in San Francisco. Touring the world in the mega luxury liners were a crowning symbol of his success and achievement later in life. But when I took a job on a cruise line, in 2005, I realized there was a little more to cruising than his pretty pictures convey.

Since I was asked for clarification about this phrase, yesterday, here it is:

“A cruise ship can be like a slave ship for the people who work there.” I’m remembering the words of an African American chef who worked with me. He had spent more than sixty consecutive days, fourteen to sixteen hours daily chopping and arranging countless vegetables for salads, fruit for fruit plates, and creating the beautiful and bountiful display of cheese and crudités for cocktail hour. His great ambition was to work on an oil rig, because he believed the pay would be better and the work easier. “People at home don’t know what it’s like,” he said as he walked by me in the passageway one morning, deep in the crew quarters that are always located under the waterline of the ship. “They think it’s paradise. They don’t know it’s like a slave ship.”

And it’s true that every time I’ve tried to explain this experience to others I’ve stumbled in truly conveying the powerlessness of the situation. Between four and five others and I did all the cleaning, all the fine dining service, and even served cookies and punch on the beach in Mexico for 103 passengers for ten weeks straight. No, it wasn’t what my contract stated, (per that document, I would have a day off each week, and only work up to 84 hours instead of the 94 and more I did) but it was work or go home. Some work can be fun. And there’s nowhere better to sleep than a boat, once you adjust to the waves. It’s like sleeping in a cradle. And the stars in the night sky. But, as even a drunken woman at dinner one night could observe, “there aren’t enough of you.”

As an American, I had U.S. labor laws at least theoretically as protection, and always, the option of leaving. But most cruise liners don't hire Americans for the same kind of work (we worked on an American flagged ship, which is somewhat unusual). Larger cruise lines hire third world workers and even charge them a $2,000 fee or more to get the job. In Indonesia or India this is so much money that workers mortgage everything they own and/or they take out loans at exorbitant rates of interest. Some people may not realize that in many countries, among poor people, honor is everything. Many will pay these loans back no matter what the working conditions are like. A man will be hired and told he will work as a waiter. The recruiting agent will “soften him” by stringing out a job offer over six months, so that the man is more and more desperate for the job and has been unable to take other permanent work because this job could start at any moment. Then once he has his contract in his hand, he will only be offered a job like a potato peeler or a person stacking deck chairs. The pay will be lower than he anticipated. He will work continuously at least twelve hours a day for eight months or so. His airline ticket home will be deducted first, and after that he can be fired with any infraction of the rules and sent home at his own expense. He must, in other words, work as an indentured servant for three or four months, before financially breaking even.

Some of this is illegal. Technically jobs on cruise ships aren’t supposed to be sold to workers. But just like clothing brands like the Gap don’t always “know” that there are kids working in garment factories that sew their labels, cruise ship companies can always claim not to know the recruiting agents in the Philippines are charging these fees. But it has been noted by cruise industry watchers like Canadian Sociology Professor and author, Ross Klein who has a website devoted to cruise ship information, also the British charity, the War on Want, and the International Trade Federation assert that these fees continue to be charged, and that working conditions on ships are difficult at best. An extensive joint report by the ITF and the War on Want documents that average time worked on a cruise ship went from three years, in the 1970’s, to eight months in 2004. Eight months—or the length of one contract—is the average time any cruise worker stays on. That, alone, says a lot. Not many workers would pay a $2,000 fee plus airfare for a job they knew they couldn’t bear to keep for more than one contract.

And there’s no reason that the industry has to be like this. In fact, bills to better regulate and improve the cruise industry have been introduced to Congress; they just haven’t had enough support. Considering who has been in power over the past eight years and more, I guess this is not surprising. When Bill Clinton was president, a bill was introduced to change the registry of cruise ships to become territories of the United States instead of territories of Hondurus or wherever their flag registries were made; you can guess how many millions were spent by the industry on lobbying to kill that bill dead.

But as for myself, I think an emotional epiphany happened one day when I was serving breakfast and I was in the throttles of pain. Medicine hadn’t helped, and there aren’t really sick days on cruise ships. I asked my boss, an otherwise nice person, if I could wear a dark sweater that matched my uniform to keep warm because it would help ease the pain. She thought about it, but said no. There is a cost to everything looking so perfect on a cruise ship, I thought.