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Maritime Labour Regimes in the Neoliberal Era

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Abstract

In the structured space of the boat as a place of work and life, maritime labour regimes can be shaped by individual workers as well as the personalities and practices of captains; the technical specifications of the workspace such as a ship’s design; and the broader institutions that simultaneously connect multiple places of work such as (non-)regulation by flag states. An ocean-going ship is not simply a vessel of exchange; it is also a site of work and production. Workers shape labour regimes through past class antagonisms and their compromises which may become codified in national and international law and forms of private ordering; in local historical cultures of labour organizing of greater or weaker militancy; and in contemporaneous struggles, whether in the form of direct resistance, indirect resilience or reworking. This article examines maritime labour regimes in the neoliberal era and seeks to explore a number of questions, including what is specific to the calculus of exploitation, risk and labour-time at sea? How do the geophysical characteristics of the sea shape labour regimes on ocean-going vessels? Have the working lives of those toiling at sea changed since the inception of mercantile capitalism?

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Notes

  1. Extract of a French government report reproduced in Appendix 1 of ILO, 1921: 94.

  2. Maritime Labour Convention, 2006, Article II (4).

  3. Within the broad category of seafarers there are considerable contemporary dividing lines, such as by sub-sector (dry bulk, container vessels, specializsed cargo), different flags and/or firms within a sub-sector, and between crew in the same boat such as by rank, perceived skill and technical division of labour, nationality, race, gender, conditions of work and pay.

  4. A labour regime cannot be understood in isolation but is defined relationally, vis-à-vis other regimes in an industry or sector, and even within the same workplace (Fischer 2016).

  5. On wages forms (McCall Howard 2012: 316–343).

  6. The basic requirements were set out from 1978 with the International Convention on Standards of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping for Seafarers (or STCW).

  7. Crewing costs are proportionally lower across different types of modern ships, e.g. ‘when the capacity of a containership increases by 340%, the labor costs rise by 40%’ (Silos et al. 2012; Bagoulla and Guillotreau 2016: 25).

  8. Although there is evidence that this has improved on bigger, newer ships in the 2010s (Sampson et al. 2017); ‘The working and living’. A small number of cargo ships were designed in the early 1970s as experiments with practices of industrial democracy (Lezaun 2009).

  9. State subsidies are another important competitive strategy in the global shipping industry.

  10. The first strategy – technological change – is a focus of Chapter Five of Campling and Colas (2021).

  11. All industries rely on migrant labour in varied forms, and export processing zones sometimes allow for the employment of people from anywhere, but there are often conditions attached (e.g. work permits), and no other industry has the globally generalized labour market conditions that characterize international shipping.

  12. See the extensive discussion of new entrant FOC states in Alderton and Winchester (2002).

  13. Desombre (2006) does not reach this conclusion herself, but it is apparent from a comparison of the data in her Appendix C.

  14. Interviews, Japanese industry representatives, 2006.

  15. Beneficial ownership of the merchant fleet in the early twenty-first century sees capital headquartered in Western Europe and, increasingly, East Asia.

  16. Multiple interviews, representatives of French and Spanish boat owners, and Malagasy and Seychellois crew, Antsiranana, Madagascar in December 2013 and Port Victoria, Seychelles in January 2014.

  17. Personal Communication, EU distant water fleet representative, January 2014.

  18. Multiple interviews, labour representatives in Madagascar and Seychelles, 2013 and 2014.

  19. Participating in an international meeting of fishers’ trade unions in 2014, the author was struck with the similarities of the types of lines being taken with inter-state negotiations at the WTO on fisheries trade-related issues that he had attended. Several of the fishers’ unions took explicit ‘national interest’ lines which were often defensive in relation to national industry (and thus national jobs).

  20. Walters and Bailey (2013: 93); interview, fishing crew representative, Antsiranana, Madagascar in December 2013.

  21. Interviews, union representatives, Antsiranana, Madagascar in December 2013.

  22. Interview, crew agency representative, Antsiranana, Madagascar in December 2013. Similar sentiments were shared by another two crew agencies in Madagascar interviewed at the same time and two in Seychelles interviewed a month afterwards.

  23. The Spring Strike of 1936 against poor working conditions at sea was the spark in the creation of the National Maritime Union – the main American union of ‘unlicensed’ seafarers (Fink 1977: 214-15).

  24. For a descriptive history, see Chapter 14 of ITF (1996).

  25. For example, some open registries reduced the number of ITF agreements between 2000 and 2001, e.g. Panama from 34% to 27.6%, Liberia from 54% to 40.7%, and Vanuatu from 15% to 10.5%. DESOMBRE 2006, Appendix F.

  26. Personal communication, ITF representative, December 2014 (Turnbull 2006; Fox-Hodess 2017).

  27. Maritime Labour Convention, 2006.

  28. This discussion of the MLC benefitted from a collective reading by the London Sea Reading group, particularly the legal interpretations of Stephanie Jones and Stewart Motha.

  29. It also prohibits the practice noted above of negative-listing of seafarers by crew agents.

  30. For example, some seek to explain the internationalization of the firm as a divide and rule strategy vis-à-vis labour (Peoples and Sugden 2001).

  31. ILO, ‘Database on reported incidents of abandonment of seafarers’: https://www.ilo.org/dyn/seafarers/seafarersbrowse.home (last updated 31 August 2023).

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  1. Queen Mary University of London and Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK

    Liam Campling & Alejandro Colás

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Correspondence to Liam Campling.

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Campling, L., Colás, A. Maritime Labour Regimes in the Neoliberal Era. Development 66, 65–75 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41301-023-00369-0

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