For most of the past 200 years, the regulation of maritime labor has tended to reflect the prevailing political ideologies of the world's commercial centers, but always, Leon Fink insists, with a distinctly maritime twist. On the one hand, as even Adam Smith recognized, deep-sea shipping plays too important a role in creating and sustaining the global commodity market as a physical reality for any government to leave seafaring labor wholly unregulated. On the other hand, no single nation or even hegemonic empire can hope to exercise exclusive regulatory control over an industry that stretches around the globe and operates, by definition, beyond and between national boundaries. As a result, from the era of classical liberalism in the mid-nineteenth century through the high point of welfare statism in the early twentieth century, state-led, nationalist efforts to regulate maritime labor – be they coercive or corporatist – all failed. By contrast, in our own era of neoliberal resurgence, efforts led by international labor unions and organizations dedicated to improving working conditions at sea rather than managing a critical national industry abroad have fared rather better. Indeed, the success of these efforts even suggest “the possibilities of humane governance in a globalized world economy” (p. 6). Thus, the surprising and perhaps a touch optimistic conclusion of Leon Fink's new book on the history of maritime labor regulation in the eras of British and American imperial hegemony.
Maritime history is going through a period of creative revival. Thanks to the foundational work of Marcus Rediker, Daniel Vickers, Jeffrey Bolster, Tim LeGoff, Alain Cabantous, Pablo E. Pèrez-Mallaína, and others, we can now be fairly confident in our knowledge about work at sea and the functioning of the maritime labor market in the early modern period. Recently, scholars who had hitherto focused primarily on the Atlantic world have extended their horizons and joined fruitful conversations with historians of Indian Ocean, South China Seas, Pacific, even Arctic and Antarctic seafaring. Piracy on all the seven seas continues to enjoy extraordinary popularity among experts and lay people alike. There have been important studies on gender, racial, national, and other identities especially among North American maritime communities, work that has benefited immensely from the help of literary scholars. Despite this thematic and geographic broadening of the field, however, few studies have stretched their chronological reach beyond the early nineteenth century, a failure that makes this new work by one of North America's most distinguished, most transnationally-minded labor historians all the more welcome.
Sweatshops at Sea is organized chronologically into three parts, beginning in the early nineteenth century. In Part 1 (“Mastered and Commanded”), Fink suggests that contrary to the general spirit of the age, which saw many coercive labor relations abolished on land, especially among white men, and even though the United States made “sailors’ rights” a casus belli in 1812, seafaring workers continued to find themselves subject to paternalist control, high levels of disciplinary violence, limited physical mobility, and severely restricted freedom of contract. British authorities in particular were loath to relinquish their hold on workers who had long been considered a strategic national resource. The rising capital intensity and geographic reach of steam-powered shipping meanwhile added further arguments against reforms that might have destabilized the industry or given a competing nation's fleet a cost advantage in the post-mercantilist era of free trade. Thus, even as Britain moved full steam ahead into a period of liberal reforms, in this context crowned by the 1849 repeal of the Navigation Acts, followed in 1854 by the Merchant Shipping Act, the law continued to sanction harsh penalties for ill-discipline and especially for desertion. In the antebellum United States, where Jolly Jack Tar had emerged during the War of 1812 as a nationalist and implicitly white symbol of plucky republicanism, parallel legislation subjected sailors to treatment that was uncomfortably reminiscent of southern slavery. And yet, as in the United Kingdom, it took until the rise of welfare statism at the turn of the twentieth century for public outrage at the seamen's plight to translate into serious reform efforts.
Fink analyzes those reform efforts in the next three chapters, which together comprise Part 2 (“Strategies of Reform”) and are focused in turn on the British parliamentary reformer Samuel Plimsoll, the ship-jumping Norwegian-American labor leader Andrew Furuseth – with a visage, allegedly, like the “prow of a Viking ship” (p. 95) –, and finally the pioneering British labor internationalist Havelock Wilson. Plimsoll, a crusading Member of Parliament working in the proud British tradition of morally outraged middle-class reform, by sheer force of will and a skillful leveraging of public anger, pushed the government to abandon its laissez-faire attitude to shipboard working conditions and instead begin to regulate out of existence those unseaworthy coffin ships that every year killed hundreds if not thousands of British seamen. The United States in 1915 went one step further and imposed improved shipboard working conditions, not just on its own merchant fleet but on every vessel calling on its ports, thus utilizing the nation's bulging economic might to attempt the creation of a uniform maritime labor market across the world's oceans. This apparent internationalism, however, was primarily designed to prevent the post-reform US merchant fleet from becoming utterly uncompetitive by forcing up the cost of low-wage foreign laborers and replacing them, preferably with racially white native-born sailors. Across the North Atlantic, meanwhile, seamen's unions were beginning to reach beyond national boundaries to agitate for further improvements to shipboard working conditions, an effort that remained limited first by the attempt to sideline African and Asian maritime workers and, secondly, by the radical nationalist fragmentation of World War I.
In Part 3 (“A World Fit for Seafarers?”), Fink finally discovers the slow emergence of a functioning international regulatory regime that takes account of the various imbalances and the fluidity of the global maritime labor market. The first push came with the creation of the International Labor Organization (ILO) in the immediate aftermath of World War I, a “reformers’ redoubt” (p. 149) that sought to avert the threat of lower-deck militancy by bringing together labor leaders, governments, and capitalists from across the industrialized world. The Great Depression and World War II, however, soon undermined the progress of the early interwar years, and once again replaced international cooperation with nationalist protectionism. In the postwar decades, marked by an upswing in seamen's union strength and followed by the full denationalization of maritime capital with the rise of flags of convenience, cross-border cooperation was renewed, but this time under the leadership of maritime unions and without the racist exclusionism that had accompanied such efforts in the past. At the turn of the twenty-first century, we find the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), an umbrella organization for 201 affiliated unions and 720,000 seafarers worldwide, in a position strong enough effectively to impose minimum standards across the global maritime labor market, thus preventing the “race to the bottom” (p. 193) usually associated with unmoored, globalized capital.
As this brief summary suggests, Sweatshops at Sea is a study of chronologically deep and geographically impressive scope, yet at the same time it remains curiously limited. Fink rarely steps below deck – in fact, hardly goes to sea at all – and haunts parliamentary sessions, public meetings, and international standard-setting conferences instead. As he freely admits in the Introduction (though his title is a different matter), seafarers themselves at most appear as objects of his story, not as agents whose resistance, collaboration, mobility, and collective organization make the global maritime labor market so unique in the first place. Without an exploration of the dynamics of this labor market, an exploration of the struggles over working conditions that take place on each ship, neither the repeated failures of reform nor its eventual, unlikely success in the context of neoliberal deregulation is fully explicable.
Even so, Sweatshops at Sea will prove an indispensable, deeply researched companion to anyone who wishes to understand these matters, as well as an inspiration to anyone who has not yet given up hope of the possibility of fair-minded, inclusive labor regulation in an age of globalized capital. The book is handsomely produced, contains endnotes, an index, and a very detailed and usefully organized “Works Cited” section. It is also reasonably priced.
