Mobile work in the shipping industry

Ships are one of the most demanding working environments. Crews on commercial ocean-going vessels are typically multinational. The global labour market for seafarers is structured along racial and ethnic lines. Most seafarers come from the Global South. They work on short-term contracts and are paid less than colleagues from the Global North. In this video, Luisa Piart and Biao Xiang discuss how mobile labour is organized through this globalized but segmented market.

Luisa Piart is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Conversation recorded on 27 July 2021