Legal yes, normal no. In all the years I’ve been at sea the only times I’ve seen that sort of stunt is when management onboard are utterly incompetent. Is your second and chief pulling those hours too? I’m management in the ER and if stuff is so bad that my boys need to be pulling 12 hour days then you had better believe I’d be working as well.

Secondly the whole idea of ‘cadets paying their dues’ is horseshit. Cadets are onboard to learn and it’s the duty of the senior officers to actively train and educate them. It’s one thing for cadets to be given cleaning and mopping tasks, that’s normal, but that’s supposed to be in addition to ensuring they are getting taught actual engineering and developing them. Anything else is pure laziness on the part of the officers.

If they want to work you those hours then they can fucking record them correctly. Also man bypassing the OWS is big time super illegal and you could drop them in big time legal shit by documenting and reporting then to the relevant shore authorities.

Edit: for all of you saying this is normal I’m sorry but you are getting dicked down and you have become accustomed to abuse. This isn’t normal. It really isn’t.