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

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.