Book Review: Sea-Time

Sea-Time: An Ethnographic Adventure, by Helen Sampson (2024). New York: Routledge.

Shipping is the backbone of global trade, with over 80 percent of goods transported by sea. Yet, despite our dependence on this form of transport, the industry remains largely hidden from public view. In her ethnography of the merchant cargo shipping sector, Helen Sampson provides a rare look into the lives of seafarers, drawing on 25 years of research, including several voyages that she takes on board cargo ships. Sampson reveals the arduous and precarious nature of seafaring work, withstood over long periods away from home on temporary contracts with oppressive hierarchies, gender norms, and minimal opportunity for “shore time” or recreation. The seafarers with whom Sampson spends time typically view their months at sea as a form of sacrifice—a period spent away from their “real lives” and relationships, endured with the hope of securing a better future life on land.

As the book’s title suggests, time is a central theme throughout the ethnography. “Sea-Time” is an industry term referring to the accumulated months and years of on-board experience gained by individual seafarers. This work experience is a valuable commodity, as specific amounts of sea-time are required both for entry-level positions and for promotion within the industry. However, actual time spent at sea is often dreaded by the seafarers themselves. Sampson frequently reflects on their experiences of time at sea, using her own accumulated “sea-time” as a shipboard ethnographer. As a result, the book serves not only as an ethnography of seafaring work but is also a reflection on the particular dynamics and challenges of conducting ethnographic fieldwork aboard ships.

Drawing on her extensive research in the shipping industry, Sampson situates these insights in a historical context, highlighting the changing working conditions over time. In the 1970s and 80s, heightened competition in the shipping industry and fluctuating freight rates drove shipping companies to cut labor costs. This led to the widespread practice of “flagging out” vessels to open shipping registers in countries such as Liberia or Panama, known as “flags of convenience,” which typically have lower tax, disclosure, and regulatory requirements. Alongside this, the phenomenon of “crewing out” emerged, allowing shipping companies to hire cheaper labor from developing countries, particularly for lower-ranking positions, creating racialized hierarchies of labor. Shipping companies began to revert back to the temporary employment practices common to the industry during the early twentieth century, which—by the mid-century period—had given way to more stable crewing strategies in line with tightening labor laws. “Flagging out” enabled operators to hire crew members on short notice and on a “per voyage” basis. Heightened competition and shrinking profit margins simultaneously led to staff reductions and austerity measures, which increased the workload for crew members and eroded their rest time.

The first six chapters chart the author’s passage on a container ship, Beluga, with interwoven ethnographic insights from voyages aboard other merchant cargo vessels. Chapter 1 sets the scene of embarking on shipboard research. Joining a vessel is accompanied by apprehension on the part of both researcher and the crew members alike, as they face separation from loved ones, a lack of privacy, and the risks and dangers of life at sea. In the ship’s stratified environment, much depends on the captain’s management style, which in turn shapes the crew’s experience on board. Chapters 2 and 3 recount the author’s experiences on Beluga’s unbroken two-week trans-Atlantic passage, reflecting on the steady rhythms and routines that define work during sea passages. As Beluga approaches land, these rhythms shift, and the crew face a barrage of administrative tasks associated with the port call. Along those lines, Chapters 4 and 5 explore seafarers’ experiences in port. While port calls were once associated with recreation and respite from work at sea, they are now highly stressful events—characterized by the pressure to stick to a schedule set by the employer on shore, as well as logistical and bureaucratic delays and compliance checks by port officials. These intense demands mean that time passes quickly, but at the cost of the seafarers’ mental and physical wellbeing. Chapter 6 concludes the ethnographic account of Sampson’s voyage on Beluga, as both the fieldworker and some crew members disembark and return home.

In Chapter 7, the book shifts to a more explicit analytical consideration of labor and time at sea, building on some of the ethnographic insights presented in the first half of the book. For seafarers, the exchange-value of time, or “work time,” is physically demarcated at sea from the use-value of time, or “free time,” which takes place ashore, at home. While contract duration was once equal to time ashore “on leave” (typically three months at sea, three months on land), lower-ranking seafarers in particular, uncertain of future work opportunities, often extend contracts up to twelve months. Under austere conditions and amid a lack of investment in social spaces and activities on board, seafarers struggle to convert any of their “free time” into socially meaningful use-value time. While time on board drags, time on shore races—as seafarers miss out on important life events, such as their children’s upbringing.

Chapter 8 considers gender issues in seafaring work, which remain remarkably static. Shipping continues to be male dominated, with women representing only one percent of seafarers. While many companies seek to change this demographic, a number of factors, such as inadequate facilities and male seafarers’ attitudes to female colleagues, continue to make ships unwelcoming working environments for women, in ways to which Sampson can relate as a female researcher on board. Chapter 9 reflects on the otherwise significant changes to seafaring work over the 25 years of Sampson’s research. Subject to growing levels of regulation and surveillance, many seafarers feel disenchanted by their work, which is increasingly dominated by compliance-related tasks and adherence to directives from shore-based staff. This undermines not only seafarers’ autonomy and sense of their work as a craft, but also, at times, occupational safety.

Chapter 10 turns to declining living and working conditions for seafarers and reflects in particular on “Covid time,” during which seafarers’ essential work in the global economy was at once made visible and yet further marginalized. While the ILO’s Maritime Labour Convention, established in 2006, was initially celebrated as a new “Bill of Rights” for seafarers, it has proven weak, in particular in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. At this time, many seafarers were stuck at sea for indefinite periods, often without pay or the possibility of disembarking during port calls or when ill, while cases of ship abandonment – which typically have abject consequences for crew members – increased.

Sea-Time provides a remarkably rich ethnographic account of seafaring work, which Sampson deftly situates in the broader context of a rapidly changing shipping industry subject to intensifying processes of globalization, competition, and regulation. This makes the book essential reading for scholars of the shipping industry as well as anthropologists and sociologists of work. At the same time, the book is a candid methodological reflection on ethnographic fieldwork onboard ships, making it a must-read for prospective shipboard ethnographers. Furthermore, the book begins to probe into the temporal dissonances at the heart of contemporary seafaring labor, which I believe is a line of analysis that could be taken further. How do seafarers attempt to reconcile the temporal dilemmas arising from the multiple, sometimes conflicting, temporal regimes that affect their work (cf. Bear 2014): between sea and shore, sea-passage and port call, and from employer pressures for a “just in time” arrival versus being at the whims of port-side logistical delays? Given that global shipping exemplifies a worldwide industry in extremis, such insights just might be indicative of the emerging temporal dynamics at play in other areas of work in this age of late capitalism.

Reference

Bear, Laura. 2014. “Doubt, conflict, mediation: The anthropology of modern time.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20: 3-30.

Author Biography

Hannah Elliott is an Assistant Professor at the Copenhagen Business School. Her research examines economic life in the margins of global capitalism. Her current research project investigates Kenya’s recruitment and engagement in the international agenda to decarbonize the global shipping industry.