Conservancy, landlord headed to mediation amid ongoing rent dispute for historic ocean liner

The conservancy that oversees a storied but aging ocean liner and its landlord are headed to mediation as they attempt to resolve a years-old rent dispute that could force the historic ship out of its berth on the Delaware River in Philadelphia.

A federal judge had ruled in June that the conservancy had until Thursday to present plans to move the SS United States, a 1,000-foot ocean liner that still holds the transatlantic speed record it set more than 70 years ago. That deadline, though, came and went after the conservancy filed a lawsuit Wednesday that accused Penn Warehousing of sabotaging its efforts to sell the vessel. The group also asked U.S. District Judge Anita B. Brody to extend the plan deadline to Dec. 5.

During a hearing Friday, Brody agreed with a lawyer for Penn Warehousing who suggested the mediation, which will be led by a federal magistrate judge. She also agreed to suspend the deadline for now.

A timetable for the mediation has not yet been determined.

The conservancy welcomed the mediation proposal, saying it would “continue to work in good faith to resolve this dispute and relocate the vessel safely.”

The conservancy has been in talks with a Florida county that wants to acquire the ship and turn it into the largest artificial reef in the world. Those plans were put on hold earlier this month when Penn Warehousing asked Okaloosa County for a $3 million payment to stay past the deadline.

Speaking at Friday's court hearing, an attorney for Penn Warehousing described the request as “negotiation 101,” t he Philadelphia Inquirer reported. Craig Mills also said the payment had been made public in past court hearings, had been asked of the conservancy before and should be taken as a starting point for negotiations.

The rent dispute stems from an August 2021 decision by Penn Warehousing to double the ship’s daily dockage to $1,700, an increase the conservancy refused to accept. The firm has said through its attorneys that it wants to regain access to the berth so it can replace the ship with a commercial customer that will provide jobs and tax revenues to the city.

When the conservancy continued to pay its previous rate, set in 2011, Penn Warehousing terminated the lease in March 2022. After much legal wrangling, Brody held a bench trial in January but also encouraged the two sides to reach a settlement instead of leaving it up to her.

She ultimately ruled that the conservancy’s failure to pay the new rate did not amount to a contract breach or entitle Penn Warehousing to damages. However, she found that under Pennsylvania contract law, the berthing agreement is terminable at will with reasonable notice.

Christened in 1952, the SS United States was once considered a beacon of American engineering, doubling as a military vessel that could carry thousands of troops. On its maiden voyage in 1952, it shattered the transatlantic speed record in both directions, when it reached an average speed of 36 knots, or just over 41 mph (66 kph), The Associated Press reported from aboard the ship.

On that voyage, the ship crossed the Atlantic in three days, 10 hours and 40 minutes, besting the RMS Queen Mary’s time by 10 hours. To this day, the SS United States holds the transatlantic speed record for an ocean liner.

It became a reserve ship in 1969 and later bounced to various private owners who hoped to redevelop it but eventually found their plans to be too expensive or poorly timed.

It has loomed for years on south Philadelphia’s Delaware waterfront.

Vehicles move past the S.S. United States moored on the Delaware River in Philadelphia, Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2024. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

A person runs past the S.S. United States moored on the Delaware River in Philadelphia, Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2024. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

The S.S. United States is moored on the Delaware River in Philadelphia, Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2024. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

The S.S. United States is moored on the Delaware River in Philadelphia, Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2024. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

The S.S. United States is moored on the Delaware River in Philadelphia, Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2024. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

S.S. United States is moored on the Delaware River in Philadelphia, Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2024. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

A person walks past the S.S. United States moored on the Delaware River in Philadelphia, Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2024. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

SPRING VALLEY, Sri Lanka (AP) — Whoever Sri Lanka's next president is, Muthuthevarkittan Manohari isn't expecting much to change in her daily struggle to feed the four children and elderly mother with whom she lives in a dilapidated room in a tea plantation.

Both leading candidates in Saturday's presidential election are promising to give land to the country's hundreds of thousands of plantation workers, but Manohari says she's heard it all before. Sri Lanka's plantation workers are a long-marginalized group who frequently live in dire poverty, but they can swing elections by voting as a bloc.

Mahohari and her family are descended from Indian indentured laborers who were brought in by the British during colonial rule to work on plantations that grew first coffee, and later tea and rubber. Those crops are still Sri Lanka's leading foreign exchange earners.

For 200 years, the community has lived on the margins of Sri Lankan society. Soon after the country became independent in 1948, the new government stripped them of citizenship and voting rights. Around 400,000 people were deported to India under an agreement with Delhi, separating many families.

The community fought for its rights, winning in stages until achieving full recognition as citizens in 2003.

There are around 1.5 million descendants of planation workers living in Sri Lanka today, including about 3.5% of the electorate, and some 470,000 people still live on plantations. The plantation community has the highest levels of poverty, malnutrition, anaemia among women and alcoholism in the country, and some of the lowest levels of education.

They're an important voting bloc, turned out by unions that double as political parties that ally with the country's major parties.

Despite speaking the Tamil language, they’re treated as a distinct group from the island’s indigenous Tamils, who live mostly in the north and east. Still, they suffered during the 26-year civil war between government forces and Tamil Tiger separatists. Plantation workers and their descendants faced mob violence, arrests and imprisonment because of their ethnicity.

Most plantation workers live in crowded dwellings called “line houses,” owned by plantation companies. Tomoya Obokata, a U.N. special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, said after a visit in 2022 that five to ten people often share a single 10-by-12-foot (3.05-by-3.6 meter) room, often without windows, a proper kitchen, running water or electricity. Several families frequently share a single basic latrine.

There are no proper medical facilities in the plantations, and the sick are attended to by so-called estate medical assistants who do not have medical degrees.

“These substandard living conditions, combined with the harsh working conditions, represent clear indicators of forced labour and may also amount to serfdom in some instances,” Obokata wrote in a report to the U.N. high commissioner for human rights.

The government has made some efforts to improve conditions for the planation workers, but years of fiscal crisis and the resistance of powerful plantation companies have blunted progress. Access to education has improved, and a small group of entrepreneurs, professionals and academics descended from planation workers has emerged.

This year, the government negotiated a raise in the minimum daily wage for a plantation worker to 1,350 rupees ($4.50) per day, plus an additional dollar if a worker picks more than 22 kilos in a day. Workers say this target is almost impossible to achieve, in part because tea bushes are often neglected and grow sparsely.

The government has built better houses for some families and the Indian government is helping to build more, said Periyasamy Muthulingam, executive director of Sri Lanka's Institute of Social Development, which works on plantation worker rights.

But many promises have gone unfulfilled. “All political parties have promised to build better houses during elections but they don’t implement it when they are in power,” Muthulingam said.

Muthulingam says more than 90% of the planation community is landless because they have been left out of the government's land distribution programs.

In this election, sitting President Ranil Wickremesinghe standing as an independent candidate has promised to give the line houses and the land they stand on to the people who live in them, and help develop them into villages. The main opposition candidate, Sajith Premadasa, has promised to break up the plantations and distribute the land to the workers as small holdings.

Both proposals will face resistance from the plantation companies.

Manohari says she's not holding out hope. She's more concerned with what's going to happen to her 16-year-old son after he was forced to drop out of school due to lack of funds.

“The union leaders come every time promising us houses and land and I would like to have them," she said. "But they never happen as promised.”

Francis reported from Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Find more of AP's Asia-Pacific coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/asia-pacific

In this combo photograph, women tea plantation workers, clockwise from top left, Kanakambige Velayudan, Kaariman Thangamma, Tharmaraj Kaladevi, Dharmawathi, Kumaralingum Kamala, and Nadaraja Chitramani pose for a photograph during a break in their work at a tea plantation in Badulla, Sri Lanka, Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

Tea plantation workers at Spring Valley Estate walk past an election poster with a portrait of the Sri Lankan president Ranil Wickremesinghe, ahead of the country's presidential election, in Badulla, Sri Lanka, Monday, Sept. 9, 2024. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

Women workers weigh plucked tea leaves at a tea plantation in Nanu Oya, Sri Lanka, Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

A woman tea plantation worker weighs a bag of tea leaves plucked at Spring Valley Estate in Badulla, Sri Lanka, Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

Tea plantation workers weigh plucked tea leaves at Spring Valley Estate in Badulla, Sri Lanka, Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

Tea plantation workers gather plucked tea leaves in a sack at Spring Valley Estate in Badulla, Sri Lanka, Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

A tea plantation worker carries a sack of tea leaves as another plucks tea leaves at Spring Valley Estate in Badulla, Sri Lanka, Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

A tea plantation worker, right, sets up a structure for weighing tea leaves in Spring Valley Estate in Badulla, Sri Lanka, Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

A tea plantation worker carries a bundle of tea leaves on her head at Spring Valley Estate in Badulla, Sri Lanka, Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

Tea bushes gleam in the afternoon light at a tea plantation in Nanu Oya, Sri Lanka, Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

A tea plantation worker carries an election poster showing a portrait of the opposition leader and presidential candidate Sajith Premadasa, during an election rally in Thalawakele, Sri Lanka, Sunday, Sept. 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

Tea plantation workers attend a presidential election rally in Thalawakele, Sri Lanka, Sunday, Sept. 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

Tea plantation workers and their children take part in a Hindu religious procession in Hatton, Sri Lanka, Sunday, Sept. 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

Tea plantation workers dance during a Hindu religious procession in Hatton, Sri Lanka, Sunday, Sept. 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

Tea plantation workers cheer for their political leaders during a presidential election rally in Thalawakele, Sri Lanka, Sunday, Sept. 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

The twin daughters of Muthuthewarkittan Manohari, a tea plantation worker, stand in the foreground as their grandmother Lakshmi, center, drinks a cup of tea in their home in Spring Valley Estate in Badulla, Sri Lanka, Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

Muthuthewarkittan Manohari, a tea plantation worker, right, bathes her younger daughter Madubhashini, as her elder daughter Shalani, center, stands at the doorway of their small house in Spring Valley Estate in Badulla, Sri Lanka, Monday, Sept. 9, 2024. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

Muthuthewarkittan Manohari, a tea plantation worker, gets ready to go to work in a tea factory in Spring Valley Estate in Badulla, Sri Lanka, Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

A woman tea plantation worker plucks tea leaves at an estate in Badulla, Sri Lanka, Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)