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.