After several days at sea, I have begun to suspect that the US may be in worse shape than I thought. Not only does our economy need imported oil and foreign capital to prosper. It also could be developing a dependence on the kindness of strangers.
I left dry land because my mother decided to celebrate her 70th birthday by inviting her children and grandchildren on a cruise – a five-day voyage from Bayonne, New Jersey, to Bermuda and back. Having grown up in the Long Island suburbs of New York, I viewed cruises as the vacation equivalent of a trip to the local mall. But in this case, I went along for the ride and wound up having a grand time.
As I anticipated, there were a lot of Long Islanders aboard the 1,020-ft Royal Caribbean Explorer of the Seas – enough to give the expedition the surreal feel of a Seinfeld episode remade as an epic movie. But the food was good, the facilities were awesome (the ship came complete with an ice-skating rink) and the weather in Bermuda was glorious. Our party of 10 even managed to remain civil despite having to wrestle three times a day with that great Long Island existential question – to eat at the buffet or to enjoy sit-down service in the dining room.
My only unsettling moment came one night after dinner, while I was shooting hoops with my son at the outdoor basketball court on the 13th deck. Another boy joined us and, after he grabbed a rebound, he stopped for a moment and looked straight at my son and me, as children do when they are about to make a significant declaration.
“You know,” he said, “people on this ship are really nice.”
His comment made an impression on me because my two children had been saying much the same thing, in much the same way. The people on the ship, they kept repeating, are so nice.
The people who charmed the children were the workers on board – waiters, housekeepers, cooks and so on. And the one thing almost all of them had in common was that they were born in a country other than the US – several dozen in all, we were told.
In other words, the people having the fun and making the inevitable mess aboard the Explorer of the Seas were almost all Americans while the people being nice were almost all non-Americans.
This struck me as an interesting division of activities. At financial publications such as this one, we often speak of the US as an importer of “labour”. But after spending time aboard the Explorer of the Seas, I got the sense that we have been bringing in something more than that. We seem to be importing friendliness itself. And that leads to some troubling questions. If we are importing friendliness, does that mean we are suffering a shortage? Are we running out of “nice” in the same way we are running out of oil?
When I returned to work at the Financial Times, I called Royal Caribbean here in the US and spoke with one of the company’s executives about my experience. He didn’t want to be quoted by name for the usual corporate reasons but his take on the Explorer’s labour situation wasn’t that different from mine. “You probably wouldn’t get the same high-quality service with a domestic crew,” he said. “Cruise lines generally do staff their ships with international workers.”
To an extent, the Royal Caribbean executive made it clear that many members of the Explorer staff are typical of the migrant workers who take on dirty and difficult jobs around the world. He said cruise workers could be expected to work up to 18 hours a day, seven days a week, on punishing tours that keep them away from their families for six to eight months at a time. Many obviously come from poor countries and leap at a chance to make the kind of money offered by an international company.
But these are not the out-of-sight, out-of-mind workers of the farm or the factory floor. Royal Caribbean, for instance, says it tries to hire people who are bilingual because they believe this helps promote “an overall friendly attitude”. The Balinese housekeeper who twisted our bath towels into animal shapes and the Indian waitress who remembered our names at dinner were doing more than grunt work. I heard no grunting.
These people knew how to put on a show – how to react to social cues, how to adjust to circumstances, how to keep smiling in the midst of a long, hard day. As with any group of people, it’s entirely possible that there were some misfits or miscreants in the crew. But the larger point is that the workers aboard the ship knew how they were supposed to behave.
My concern is whether the wired-up Americans of the iPod age are similarly well-equipped. Do our social antennae work as effectively now that we have a world of people willing to pick up our towels after we throw them to the bathroom floor?
Since I have returned to shore, it has occurred to me that you only have to turn on a television set in this country to see more evidence of our friendliness deficit. The airwaves are lousy with talking heads bemoaning the presence of the very people who have been picking up the towels and keeping things clean for us. Maybe the time has come to start importing television commentators, too.
Gary Silverman is the FT’s US news editor; gary.silverman@ft.com
