Cruise line employment of men and women contract seafarers from all over the world since the late twentieth century has produced what is called multinational or 'mini UN' crew on board large modern cruise ships. This phenomenon is encouraged by open ship registries that legally endorse and affirm the flexibilization of labour at sea. Labour flexibilization processes, however, are not characterised solely by the demand and supply of low wage seafarers. Rather, they are mediated by perceived traits ascribed to seafarers' passport citizenship, physiognomy and biological sex. Men seafarers from countries of the Global North and South, respectively and overwhelmingly dominate the shipboard positions of senior officers and lower level support staff. Women's positioning in this uniquely stratified maritime workforce depends perceptively as well on the association of nationality, race/ethnicity and gender, with that of shipboard work. Thus, although cruise ship crew diversity appears to signify a globalized multi-cultural workforce and site at sea, seafarer recruitment and shipboard placement according to specific intersections of identity modalities disclose a troubling trend of constructing and affirming the kind of hierarchical identites reminiscent of land-based practices in the past centuries.
From: International Feminist Journal of Politics, Vol. 10 no. 1 (2008)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment