Out of the 500 000 cruise line crew members in the world today, the majority work in positions with an average salary of around $1500 per month, 7 days per week, around 11 hours per day, for 6, 7 or even 8 months straight.

We have small cabins, work in an intense and high pressure environment with an increasing amount of mandatory drills, trainings, rules and regulations to follow. We don't even have free Internet, in fact we have expensive Internet.

The majority of our time we spend away from our families, we get a short vacation that is unpaid. The $8,000 or $10,000 we have saved at the end of our contracts, shall now cover our time without income, so within two months most of us find ourselves back on board again, and this goes on and on. Perfect for the cruise line operators, which is what they want and also the reason why some of us don't even earn interest from our own money deposited into our salary account, because it is owned by the company.

This is Lena, Lena works in Housekeeping, she is a Public Area Attendant, and she just got paid. She used to earn 350 dollar per month at home before, working as a cleaner 6 days per week, 8 hours per day in a hotel, so she thought 1500 dollars per month was incredible when she got the her cruise line job.