Silversea’s crew members have presented concerns to Crew Center related to the despair between pay for the same positions. Silversea is a company which operates under Royal Caribbean Group, as a company has a long-standing consideration and business model that incorporates its crew members as they do generally understand the great importance of well trained, consistent, loyal and hardworking crew. And while Silversea does operate under RCCL, their policies can differ.

The reports made by crew members, predominantly waiters, state concerns related to differences of pay based on nationality and continental origin. The report from one of the Latin American waiters’ states that the company has always “paid two different salaries for the same position according to the nationalities, ASIANS and NON ASIANS, but recently they increased the salaries for the Waiters with a plus +500$ monthly, but not for all. This company is paying 1.6k for Asian Waiters, 2.5k for others Waiters nationalities and now 3k for European Waiters.” While Crew Center does not have a way currently to verify the validity of this statement since we do not have access to the crew members contracts, the response from Silversea HR certainly begs the question of difference in pay.

According to the crew members who made the reports to Crew Center they took steps to obtain information related to the matter by writing to the company HR. The HR representative response was that “the salaries are set at 3 different levels as per Silversea Policy. These levels are not related directly to nationality but to language skills,” the email reads.

The interaction continues with the crew member requesting transparency related to the language differences in pay as the crew states “What are the language skills? I speak English, Portuguese and Spanish and my salary is 2.5k. I have friends who speak Italian and English and are getting 3K…Are the languages skills (Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French and German)?” The response by HR related to this inquiry is that company information cannot be shared with an anonymous contact.

Crew Center's question is why this policy is not transparent to the crew members who work on board Silversea. If the salaries are different based on languages and not nationalities, then shouldn’t crew members have an equal opportunity to increase their language skills levels in order to progress to higher pay. I mean that’s how the world of business is designed, to climb the ladder whether monetary or position wise.

Silversea is no different as it is a company that’s under RCCL which is publicly traded at the New York Stock Exchange with the International Securities Identification Number (ISIN) as LR0008862868. Under the agreements for stock exchange, companies must have a certain level of transparency to the public and its employees as well in order to be able to sale shares of the company and for buyers to be informed of what they are buying stocks related to each company. One such is the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) which mandates all public companies to disclose how much they are paying their executives and employees.

This leads me to another quandary, if I were to want to apply for a job with Silversea and speak 8 languages, I would wish to know what are the languages that will bang me the most for my skill. Thus, we return to transparency which is what the crew members of Silversea would like to have and rightfully so. Crew Center currently is recommending that Silversea openly and transparently share the policy of salary differences between language skills to all crew members or anyone who may be interested in applying for a position.

Furthermore, Crew Center would like to invite Silversea to elaborate publicly on this matter here and address the concerns to its crew members who would like to keep themselves anonymous for reasons most of us crew members understand well. Crew Center also hopes that Silversea will reach a level of trustworthiness with crew members who see themselves as a part of the company and can address concerns directly, but after reading the exchange with HR it is understandable why crew members continue to seek out help from Unions and Crew Center. In the event that Silversea would like a copy of the exchange for training purposes of its HR representatives, Crew Center can request release from the crew member.

Crew Center reached out to the representative union for Silversea crew members, however, until publishing this report we haven’t received any reply.