Transnational social protections and the market: seeking support from the global cruise industry

Migration studies have mostly portrayed employers as paternalistic or exploitative, creating the very conditions that make migrants’ lives insecure and unstable. This paper challenges this view by showing how the market can also be an unlikely source of protections, where extractive work conditions co-exist with a certain degree of social support. Drawing on interviews with 45 Filipino cruise workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, I discuss how migrants used a logic of employee rights to claim benefits such as food, housing and insurance. Cruise lines willingly provided such protections, but only while workers maintained active contracts onboard their ships. Rather than a discourse of human rights, migrants use a transactional logic of workplace benefits to make corporations responsible for their basic needs. These findings emphasise the dual role makes employers an unlikely but dependable resource for migrant workers, particularly in contexts where state welfare regimes are weak or simply non-existent. These strategies, and the transactional logics that underpin them, are relatively understudied in scholarship on transnational social protections.