Sweatshops at Sea

Author: Leon Fink
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807834505
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
"Leon Fink, one of the world's best labor historians, has gone to sea and returned with a powerful yarn about the seafaring workers who built the global economy. Vividly told the breathtaking in scope, Sweatshops at Sea will be remembered as one of the most important histories of our time." Marcus Rediker, author The Slave Ship: A Human History. "Sweatshops at Sea is a masterful history that illuminates the issues of citizenship in a world of porous borders for a workforce that has always been both multinational and multiracial. Leon Fink's thoroughly researched, fascinating book provides readers with a fresh and invigorating perspective on globalization."---Nelson Lichtenstein, director, Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy, University of California, Santa Barbara.

Sweatshops at Sea

Author: Leon Fink
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807877808
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
As the main artery of international commerce, merchant shipping was the world's first globalized industry, often serving as a vanguard for issues touching on labor recruiting, the employment relationship, and regulatory enforcement that crossed national borders. In Sweatshops at Sea, historian Leon Fink examines the evolution of laws and labor relations governing ordinary seamen over the past two centuries. The merchant marine offers an ideal setting for examining the changing regulatory regimes applied to workers by the United States, Great Britain, and, ultimately, an organized world community. Fink explores both how political and economic ends are reflected in maritime labor regulations and how agents of reform--including governments, trade unions, and global standard-setting authorities--grappled with the problems of applying land-based, national principles and regulations of labor discipline and management to the sea-going labor force. With the rise of powerful nation-states in a global marketplace in the nineteenth century, recruitment and regulation of a mercantile labor force emerged as a high priority and as a vexing problem for Western powers. The history of exploitation, reform, and the evolving international governance of sea labor offers a compelling precedent in an age of more universal globalization of production and services.

White-collar Sweatshop

Author: Jill Andresky Fraser
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393323207
Category : Beskæftigelse
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Book Description
With facts, figures, and trenchant case histories, Jill Fraser chronicles the catastrophic sea change in industry after industry: telecommunications, the media, banking, information technology, Wall Street. Her book is essential reading for anyone concerned with the future of the American economy--or worried about their own job.

Sweated Work, Weak Bodies

Author: Daniel E. Bender
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813533384
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
In the early 1900s, thousands of immigrants labored in New Yorks Lower East Side sweatshops, enduring work environments that came to be seen as among the worst examples of Progressive-Era American industrialization. Although reformers agreed that these unsafe workplaces must be abolished, their reasons have seldom been fully examined. Sweated Work, Weak Bodies is the first book on the origins of sweatshops, exploring how they came to represent the dangers of industrialization and the perils of immigration. It is an innovative study of the language used to define the sweatshop, how these definitions shaped the first anti-sweatshop campaign, and how they continue to influence our current understanding of the sweatshop.

Capitalism and the Sea

Author: Liam Campling
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1784785261
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 433

Book Description
What keeps capitalism afloat? The global ocean has through the centuries served as a trade route, strategic space, fish bank and supply chain for the modern capitalist economy. While sea beds are drilled for their fossil fuels and minerals, and coastlines developed for real estate and leisure, the oceans continue to absorb the toxic discharges of our carbon civilization - warming, expanding, and acidifying the blue water part of the planet in ways that will bring unpredictable but irreversible consequences for the rest of the biosphere. In this bold and radical new book, Campling and Colás analyze these and other sea-related phenomena through a historical and geographical lens. In successive chapters dealing with the political economy, ecology and geopolitics of the sea, the authors argue that the earth's geographical separation into land and sea has significant consequences for capitalist development. The distinctive features of this mode of production continuously seek to transcend the land-sea binary in an incessant quest for profit, engendering new alignments of sovereignty, exploitation and appropriation in the capture and coding of maritime spaces and resources.

The Transformation of Maritime Professions

Author: Karel Davids
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031272129
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Book Description
This book deals with the economic impact of technological changes and the rise of passenger shipping on social relations on board and ashore in European shipping industries between c.1850 and 2000. The changes in motive power, communication techniques and positioning technologies and the rise of passenger shipping went together with the creation of new tasks and functions and the marginalization or disappearance of traditional jobs and skills. This book presents case-studies on changes in different maritime professions between the middle of the nineteenth century and the end of the twentieth century, covering the shipping industries of a variety of seafaring countries in Europe. The subjects include changes in maritime labour at large, changes in specific groups of deck, catering or engine room personnel, such as captains, cooks, catering personnel, engineers, or radio-operators. A number of chapters employ a prosopographical or micro-historical approach, while others apply a spatial perspective, analyze business records, materials from professional associations or distil information from large sets of quantitative data. This book will be of interest to academics and students of economic history, maritime and labour history.

Suburban Sweatshops

Author: Jennifer GORDON
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674037820
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 375

Book Description
In 1992 Gordon founded the Workplace Project to help immigrant workers in the underground suburban economy of Long Island, New York. In a story of gritty determination and surprising hope, she weaves together Latino immigrant life and legal activism to tell the unexpected tale of how the most vulnerable workers in society came together to demand fair wages, safe working conditions, and respect from employers.

Shipping and Globalization in the Post-War Era

Author: Niels P. Petersson
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303026002X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Book Description
This open access book belongs to the Maritime Business and Economic History strand of the Palgrave Studies in Maritime Economics book series. This volume highlights the contribution of the shipping industry to the transformations in business and society of the postwar era. Shipping was both an example and an engine of globalization and structural change. In turn, the industry experienced and pioneered, mirrored and enabled key developments that led to the present-day globalized economy. Contributions address issues such as the macro-level shift of shipping’s centre of gravity from Europe to Asia, the political and legal frameworks within which it developed, the strategies and performance of both successful and unsuccessful firms, and the links between the shipping industry and the wider economy and society. Without shipping and its ability to forge connections and networks of a global reach, the modern world would look very different. By bringing together scholars from various disciplinary and national backgrounds, this book advances our understanding of the linkages that bind economies and societies together.

Poseidon's Curse

Author: Christopher P. Magra
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316875911
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351

Book Description
Poseidon's Curse interprets the American Revolution from the vantage point of the Atlantic Ocean. Christopher P. Magra traces how British naval impressment played a leading role in the rise of Great Britain's seaborne empire, yet ultimately contributed significantly to its decline. Long reliant on appropriating free laborers to man the warships that defended British colonies and maritime commerce, the British severely jeopardized mariners' earning potential and occupational mobility, which led to deep resentment toward the British Empire. Magra explains how anger about impressment translated into revolutionary ideology, with impressment eventually occupying a major role in the Declaration of Independence as one of the foremost grievances Americans had with the British government.

Making Men in the Age of Sail

Author: Graeme J. Milne
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0228021847
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 164

Book Description
Myths and stereotypes surrounding seafarers in the Age of Sail persist to this day. Sailors were celebrated for their courage, strength, and skill, yet condemned for militancy, vice, and fecklessness. As sail gave way to steam, sailing-ship mariners became nostalgic symbols of maritime prowess and heritage, representing a timeless, heroic masculinity in an era when the modernizing industrial world was challenging assumptions about gender, class, work, and society. Drawing on British seafaring memoirs from the late nineteenth century, Making Men in the Age of Sail argues that maritime writing moulded the reading public’s image of the merchant seaman. Authors chronicled their lives as they grew from boy sailors to trained seafarers, telling colourful tales of the men they worked with – most never doubted that the sailing ship had made them better men. Their testimony reinforced and preserved conservative perspectives on seafaring manhood as Britain’s economic and technological priorities continued to evolve in the new steamship age. Offering a gender analysis of the image of the seafarer, Making Men in the Age of Sail brings the history of British sailors into wider debates about modernity and masculinity.