Supply Nets: The Logistics of Seafarer Abandonment

Abstract

This paper studies the infrastructural and organisational forms that facilitate labour exploitation within maritime logistics. My entry point is the rising wave of seafarer abandonments, which I approach not as isolated incidents of mismanagement but as an intensification of the flexibilising tendencies underpinning contemporary capitalism. I trace the recent history of these dynamics, examining their effect on shipping labour. I then investigate some of the specific legal and economic mechanics of shipping, focusing on debt, insurance, and bordering. Using supply chain mapping software, I study supply systems in a way that centres labour rather than the commodities being moved. I close by claiming that abandonments are not an accident, but an inevitable endpoint of a system designed to precaritise labour while protecting shipowners’ profits. Against this, I sketch out a new way of conceiving of supply chains—as supply nets, matrices of interconnected lines, prone to becoming tangled.