Sweatshops at Sea: Merchant Seamen in the World's First Globalized Industry, from 1812 to the Present - Softcover

Fink, Leon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1469613697 ISBN 13: 9781469613697

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Book Description:

" 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

From the Inside Flap:

Leon 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.

About this edition

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1469613697
• ISBN 13: 9781469613697
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288