Working on the Water: On Legal Space and Seafarer Protection in the Cruise Industry

Abstract

With a focus on Filipino seafarers, the largest cohort of workers on cruise ships, this article argues that recent legal decisions in U.S. courts on the employment and protection of international cruise ship workers have repositioned the historical relationships between seafarers and their employers and have created a new extraterritorial legal space in which seafarers’ rights are diminished. In this context, Filipino seafarers find themselves embedded in a dynamic transnational system that facilitates their entry into the cruise industry yet structures a diminution of their protection under the law. This process represents a rollback of historical protections that have favored seafarers in U.S. courts. This case calls into question how laws and legal framings serve to buttress labor relationships between people and places, thereby shaping economic geographies. Thus, this article illustrates the power of a legal geographic framework to examine economic relationships and therefore to shed light on how economic globalization is facilitated and shaped at multiple scales. It offers a geographic perspective on how the legal and the economic are implicated in one another and suggests that further attention to legal geographic aspects of economic and labor geographies would be useful for analyzing the maintenance of inequalities in the global system.

Key Words:

• cruise industry
• labor geographies
• legal geographies
• Philippines

Acknowledgments

I thank all the respondents who spoke to me during this project, but special thanks go to the dozens of cruise ship workers who gave me so much of their precious time. Their hard work makes leisure possible for so many others. This article is dedicated to them. I also thank Caroline Nagel, Ann Kingsolver, Michael Finewood, John Lauermann, Joshua Barkan, and the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on various drafts, which undoubtedly made this a better article. To Amy Mills, I can only express deep gratitude for her guidance and confidence in this project. Finally, I thank my wife, Anne, for her continuing support of every kind. Simply put, she is a saint. This article would have been impossible without her.

Notes

1 These tort defenses are contributory negligence, assumption of risk, and the fellow-servant rule. Contributory negligence is the common-law definition of negligence that if a plaintiff is in any way negligent, he or she will not be due an award regardless of the defendant’s own negligence. Assumption of risk is the idea that if a plaintiff is aware of any risks that contributed to injury, he or she will not be entitled to compensation. Finally, under the fellow-servant rule, if a worker is injured by a fellow worker, it is the fellow worker who is liable, not the company that employs both. All these rules were effectively superseded by the Jones Act.