Seamen's Act
1915 American law regarding maritime worker's rights
The Seamen's Act, formally known as Act to Promote the Welfare of American Seamen in the Merchant Marine of the United States or Longshore and Harbor Workers' Compensation Act (Act of March 4, 1915, ch. 153, 38 Stat. 1164), was designed to improve the safety and security of United States seamen and eliminate shanghaiing.
"The 1915 statute ... has been described as the Magna Carta of American sailors' rights."
History
Trade unions like the International Seamen's Union (ISU) provided much of the impetus for the bill, further promoted by the increasing international tensions in the years preceding World War I. The bill was first proposed in 1913 but it became a law after the beginning of hostilities in Europe, though before the United States joined the conflict. The sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912 raised the issue of safety at sea as a political issue as well.
The Act was sponsored in the United States Senate by Robert Marion La Follette. The ISU had a significant influence on the drafting of the Bill, with the President of the Union, Andrew Furuseth, cited as being behind the intent and content of the bill. Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson supported its passage.
It was the culmination of twenty years of agitation by the Seamen's Union President Andrew Furuseth.
“Seamen's Act” enters the record as 1915 American law regarding maritime worker's rights. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Seamen's, American and regarding can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7440703. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1915, 1164, 1913 and 1912.
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This entry incorporates text from “Seamen's Act” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.