'A Sea Change': Transforming Temporalities of Shipping Labor since the 1970s
In his seminal text, The condition of postmodernity, political geographer David Harvey argues that a series of shifts in the way global capitalism operates has produced a change in how we experience time and space, which he refers to as “time-space compression.” “There has been a sea-change,” he writes, “in cultural as well as political-economic practices since around 1972. This sea-change is bound up with the emergence of new dominant ways in which we experience space and time” (1989: vii).
Although not explicitly discussed in Harvey’s work, central to this “sea-change,” I argue, is the sea itself. The sea, the ships and the sailors traveling on it, are key elements of this transformation of the global political economy. Shipping has been central to globalizing processes like the tremendous acceleration of movements of goods, capital, and labor across the world, the outsourcing of production, and the circulation of exchange.
This paper draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork onboard cargo-ships and on life-story interviews with sailors of different generations and nationalities, to explore this sea-change as experienced by a group of workers who are key to the operations of global capitalism. I focus on two kinds of temporal transformations of maritime labor. The first is the speeding up of transport through technologies like containerization, automated ports, and more efficient cargo handling, which have significantly shortened ships’ turnaround times. The second is related to shifts in labor politics and recruitment practices, which have had effects on the length of employment contracts, employment security, and relative autonomy of workers with regards to their work schedules. The paper argues that these different processes of time-space compression have completely transformed the everyday experiences of work at sea, leading sailors to feel increasingly imprisoned onboard their mobile worksites.
References:
Harvey, David. 1989. The condition of postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell.
