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.

Capitalism and the Sea

Author: Liam Campling
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1784785237
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.

A World at Sea

Author: Lauren Benton
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812297342
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Book Description
The past twenty-five years have brought a dramatic expansion of scholarship in maritime history, including new research on piracy, long-distance trade, and seafaring cultures. Yet maritime history still inhabits an isolated corner of world history, according to editors Lauren Benton and Nathan Perl-Rosenthal. Benton and Perl-Rosenthal urge historians to place the relationship between maritime and terrestrial processes at the center of the field and to analyze the links between global maritime practices and major transformations in world history. A World at Sea consists of nine original essays that sharpen and expand our understanding of practices and processes across the land-sea divide and the way they influenced global change. The first section highlights the regulatory order of the seas as shaped by strategies of land-based polities and their agents and by conflicts at sea. The second section studies documentary practices that aggregated and conveyed information about sea voyages and encounters, and it traces the wide-ranging impact of the explosion of new information about the maritime world. Probing the political symbolism of the land-sea divide as a threshold of power, the last section features essays that examine the relationship between littoral geographies and sociolegal practices spanning land and sea. Maritime history, the contributors show, matters because the oceans were key sites of experimentation, innovation, and disruption that reflected and sparked wide-ranging global change. Contributors: Lauren Benton, Adam Clulow, Xing Hang, David Igler, Jeppe Mulich, Lisa Norling, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, Carla Rahn Phillips, Catherine Phipps, Matthew Raffety, Margaret Schotte.

Behind the Screen

Author: Sarah T. Roberts
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300245319
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
An eye-opening look at the invisible workers who protect us from seeing humanity’s worst on today’s commercial internet Social media on the internet can be a nightmarish place. A primary shield against hateful language, violent videos, and online cruelty uploaded by users is not an algorithm. It is people. Mostly invisible by design, more than 100,000 commercial content moderators evaluate posts on mainstream social media platforms: enforcing internal policies, training artificial intelligence systems, and actively screening and removing offensive material—sometimes thousands of items per day. Sarah T. Roberts, an award-winning social media scholar, offers the first extensive ethnographic study of the commercial content moderation industry. Based on interviews with workers from Silicon Valley to the Philippines, at boutique firms and at major social media companies, she contextualizes this hidden industry and examines the emotional toll it takes on its workers. This revealing investigation of the people “behind the screen” offers insights into not only the reality of our commercial internet but the future of globalized labor in the digital age.

Out of Sight

Author: Erik Loomis
Publisher: New Press, The
ISBN: 1620970775
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 189

Book Description
A provocative analysis of labor, globalization, and environmental harm by the award-winning historian and author of A History of America in Ten Strikes. In the current state of our globalized economy, corporations have no incentive to protect their workers or the environment. Jobs moves seamlessly across national borders while the laws that protect us from rapacious behavior remain bound by them. As a result, labor exploitation and toxic pollution remain standard practice. In Out of Sight, Erik Loomis—a historian of both the labor and environmental movements—follows a narrative that runs from the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City to the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory outside of Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2013. He demonstrates that our modern systems of industrial production are just as dirty and abusive as they were during the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age. The only difference is that the ugly side of manufacturing is now hidden in faraway places where workers are most vulnerable. In this Choice Outstanding Academic Title, Loomis shows that the great environmental victories of twentieth-century America—the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the EPA—were actually union victories. Using this history as a call to action, Out of Sight proposes a path toward regulations that follow corporations wherever they do business, putting the power back in workers’ hands. “The story told here is tragic and important.” —Bill McKibben “Erik Loomis prescribes how activists can take back our country—for workers and those who care about the health of our planet.” —Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH)

The Communist Party on the American Waterfront

Author: Vernon L. Pedersen
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498598021
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Book Description
In the early years of the Great Depression, the Marine Workers Industrial Union (MWIU) was a colorful presence on the American Waterfront. In 1935, the MWIU seemed to vanish, closing its halls and stopping its publications. Vernon L. Pedersen convincingly demonstrates that the MWIU did not vanish—instead it was ordered by the Moscow-based Communist International to send its members into mainstream ALF unions and take over from the inside. Initiated by accident on the west coast and deliberately duplicated in the east, the Communists seized control of the west coast longshoremen’s union, destroyed the International Seamen’s Union, and created the Communist-dominated National Maritime Union.

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.

Mediterranean Seafarers in Transition

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004514198
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 637

Book Description
This volume discusses the effects of industrialization on maritime trade, labour and communities in the Mediterranean and Black Sea from the 1850s to the 1920s. The 17 essays are based on new evidence from multiple type of primary sources on the transition from sail to steam navigation, written in a variety of languages, Italian, Spanish, French, Greek, Russian and Ottoman. Questions that arise in the book include the labour conditions, wages, career and retirement of seafarers, the socio-economic and spatial transformations of the maritime communities and the changes in the patterns of operation, ownership and management in the shipping industry with the advent of steam navigation. The book offers a comparative analysis of the above subjects across the Mediterranean, while also proposes unexplored themes in current scholarship like the history of navigation. Contributors are: Luca Lo Basso, Andrea Zappia, Leonardo Scavino, Daniel Muntane, Eduard Page Campos, Enric Garcia Domingo, Katerina Galani, Alkiviadis Kapokakis, Petros Kastrinakis, Kalliopi Vasilaki, Pavlos Fafalios, Georgios Samaritakis, Kostas Petrakis, Korina Doerr, Athina Kritsotaki, Anastasia Axaridou, and Martin Doerr.

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.