Supply Nets: The Logistics of Seafarer Abandonment
Jacob Bolton
March 2024
This essay studies the infrastructural and organisational forms that facilitate labour exploitation within maritime logistics. The entry point is the rising wave of sea-farer abandonments, which I approach not as isolated incidents of mismanagement but as an intensification of the flexibilising tendencies underpinning contemporary capitalism. Tracing the recent history of these dynamics, examining their effect on shipping labour. Jacob Bolton goes onto investigate some of the specific legal and economic mechanics of shipping, focusing on debt, insurance, and bordering. Using supply chain mapping software, he studies supply systems in a way that centres labour rather than the commodities being moved. By claiming that abandonments are not an accident, but an inevitable endpoint of a system designed to precaritise labour while protecting shipowners’ profits Bolton sketches out a new way of conceiving of supply chains—as supply nets, matrices of interconnected lines, prone to becoming tangled.
Read Supply Nets: The Logistics of Seafarer Abandonment
Read Supply Nets: The Logistics of Seafarer Abandonment