Maritime Skills and the (Not So) Changing Qualification Landscape in Global Shipping

Abstract This article examines transformations of labour through an exploration of the shipping sector and the emerging responses and adaptations of seafarers to processes aimed at standardising skills in an increasingly automated workplace. Focusing on on-board occupational relations, I investigate how maritime industries use labour and highlight the underlying dynamics behind how the popular image of the global transport system – which gives the impression of it being equivalent to a factory assembly line – is enabled and reinforced. The article argues that this image is not only connected to how the industry and its regulations are formally and institutionally produced – through logics of efficiency, large-scale infrastructure, and automation – but also enacted by the types of everyday labour seafarers undertake, whose skills, experiences, personalities, and social competencies, which shape their extractive practices in many ways, are deeply racialised and culturally biased.