Making Shrimp in Moral Economies: Time, Ethics, and Labor in a Global Supply Chain

ABSTRACT This article is part of the special issue 'Morality at Work: Ethnographies of Labor and Ethics' edited by Michael Vine and Sarah Winkler‐Reid. This article explores how future‐oriented temporalities shape people's labor experiences and ethical subjectivities within the global supply chain of brown shrimp. Drawing on ethnographic research with Dutch fishers, Moroccan shrimp peelers, and European processing managers, it traces how embedded notions of risk, luck, and destiny mediate workers' engagement with the uncertainty of the future. Processing company managers in Europe employ risk management practices to assert control over volatile markets, while North Sea fishers rely on notions of luck to navigate the unpredictability of fishing. In Moroccan peeling factories, workers often invoke destiny when making sense of their precarious working conditions. This article argues that attention to these divergent orientations toward the future offers critical insight into the moral economies that drive different forms of work under global capitalism.