(PDF) Geographic limits to global labor market flexibility: The human resources paradox of the cruise industry

The cruise industry enjoys arguably the most flexible and globalized of all labor markets. Yet, in an apparent paradox, cruise lines face a potential labor shortage, despite the fact that the bulk of their labor is sourced from the Global South where a large labor surplus would seemingly make recruitment a simple process. This paper examines this paradox in greater detail with a focus on the tension that exists between the industry’s demand for a flexible labor force, and the need for workers who maintain the skills required of a cruise ship job. It is argued that the contemporary geography of global labor recruitment is constrained by the particular political, economic and cultural circumstances of individual source countries that make certain cohorts less attractive or available as a workforce. In practice the need for skill and flexibility are not always reconcilable and cruise lines have found that there is a geographic limit to labor market flexibility. The article is based on interviews with various stakeholders involved in either working on cruise ships or in recruiting workers. Special emphasis is placed on Filipino cruise ship workers and labor recruiters as a means to discuss labor recruitment for the entire industry.

Geoforum 42 (2011) 660–670 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Geoforum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum Geographic limits to global labor market flexibility: The human resources paradox of the cruise industry William C. Terry ⇑ Clemson University, Department of History and Geography, 126 Hardin Hall, Clemson, SC 29634, United States a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 18 June 2010 Received in revised form 17 June 2011 Available online 23 July 2011 Keywords: Cruise industry Labor geographies Labor market flexibility Tourism Labor migration Globalization a b s t r a c t The cruise industry enjoys arguably the most flexible and globalized of all labor markets. Yet, in an apparent paradox, cruise lines face a potential labor shortage, despite the fact that the bulk of their labor is sourced from the Global South where a large labor surplus would seemingly make recruitment a simple process. This paper examines this paradox in greater detail with a focus on the tension that exists between the industry’s demand for a flexible labor force, and the need for workers who maintain the skills required of a cruise ship job. It is argued that the contemporary geography of global labor recruitment is constrained by the particular political, economic and cultural circumstances of individual source countries that make certain cohorts less attractive or available as a workforce. In practice the need for skill and flexibility are not always reconcilable and cruise lines have found that there is a geographic limit to labor market flexibility. The article is based on interviews with various stakeholders involved in either working on cruise ships or in recruiting workers. Special emphasis is placed on Filipino cruise ship workers and labor recruiters as a means to discuss labor recruitment for the entire industry. Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction As production becomes more globalized, geography comes to play a greater role in determining how industries will secure their labor forces. Theoretically, globalized labor markets provide a means of achieving optimal labor market flexibility. Yet, in practice, human geographies set limits to the degree flexibilities can actually be found even at a global scale. This paper examines labor market flexibility as it is manifested in the highly globalized labor market of the cruise shipping industry. It seems a general consensus exists both explicitly and implicitly that global neo-liberal capitalism creates a ‘‘malleable’’ and ‘‘responsive’’ employment situation that promotes non-standard work and provides management with a great deal of leeway to mold flexible work regimes to fit its needs (Oladeinde, 2008, p. 57). Thus the relaxation of labor supply rules in labor-short states has resulted in the growth of a ‘‘transnational working class’’, that ‘‘exhibits great ‘labor flexibility’, increases the pool of army reserve of labor and furthermore, intensifies labor subordination to capital’’ (Kong, 2007, p. 14). In other words, with the emergence of global labor markets, ‘‘companies are now free to search the world for the most rightless and disempowered workers. . .in a position of having to accept bargains of desperation’’ (Bonacich and Wilson, 2008, p. 18). Within this broad purview, ⇑ Mobile: +1 803 312 1844. E-mail address: terry2@clemson.edu 0016-7185/$ - see front matter Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2011.06.006 ‘‘labor other than as an occasional short term impediment, is no longer a problem for capital’’ (Cumbers et al., 2008, p. 371). Deindustrialization in the Global North and the rise of sweatshop labor throughout the Global South attests to this. Yet even for globalized industries, maintaining a steady labor supply can represent a significant challenge. This reflects a broader failure of even the most nuanced strategies for conceptualizing globalized production. For example, even the global production networks (GPN) approach which has been lauded by many economic geographers for its ontological strength (e.g. Dicken et al., 2001; Henderson et al., 2002; Hess and Yeung, 2006; Coe et al., 2008), has not produced much work that treats labor as a fundamental component of global production networks. Instead, GPN research has tended to focus on how economic governance sustains accumulation, while the social relations of production have heretofore received little attention (Cumbers et al., 2008). Labor in the cruise industry provides an ideal empirical study area within the GPN approach as its labor market is perhaps the most globalized aspect of one of the most globalized of any industries, and therefore provides a snapshot of potential labor–capital relationships in the advent of more liberalized global work regimes. While there are many industries that operate transnationally, the shipping industry in general and the cruise industry in particular are unique in the ability to leverage an extremely liberalized labor market that allows companies to recruit the most globally diverse set of workers possible. This includes positions that have often been considered low or semi-skilled that remain highly restricted to local labor forces W.C. Terry / Geoforum 42 (2011) 660–670 in most countries (Nonnenmacher, 2008). With work occurring in a deterritorialized context on board ocean-going ships, cruise lines can legally recruit workers from wherever they choose. A common cruise ship will regularly employ dozens of different nationalities for its crew, which is one of the many reasons why Wood (2006) describes the cruise industry as a ‘‘paradigmatic case of globalization’’. Despite this advantage, cruise lines have not necessarily found a panacea that allows them to continually keep their ships stocked with a fresh supply of seafarers recruited from a bottomless pool of transnational laborers. In fact, in an apparent paradox, cruise lines today fear a potential worker shortage, even though the bulk of their labor comes from high unemployment regions that would seemingly ease any labor supply problems. Furthermore, the fact that some labor source regions dominate the labor market, suggests that socio-economic factors attached to particular nationalities play a significant role in determining from where labor will actually be drawn. This article examines this paradox in greater detail. In particular, I focus on the tension that exists between the industry’s demand for a flexible labor force, and the need for workers displaying a specific skill set appropriate for work on board cruise ships. In practice, these two needs are not always reconcilable and as such cruise lines have found that there is a limit to labor flexibilities that is rooted in the uneven nature of labor supply. I extend the suggestion that while transnational workforces allow employers to tap into the widest possible labor markets, with seemingly endless possibilities for contributing to strategic operational flexibility, there are geographical limits to sourcing talent. Due to political, demographic and cultural characteristics of labor supply countries or regions, the ability to recruit suitable workers varies significantly from place to place. Even in lightly regulated global labor markets with a seemingly endless surplus of workers willing to accept difficult working conditions, low wages, and many forms of risk, the geography of labor recruitment within the cruise industry limits the actual size of the reserve army of workers. A combination of a need for skilled workers, cultural characteristics of local labor markets, and worldwide demographic shifts limits the degree to which companies can easily replace workers at low cost. Thus workers who embody the qualities that are necessary for a cruise ship job are not necessarily easy to locate, even though cruise lines operate in a regulatory environment that is generally conducive to their recruitment efforts. This article serves to shed light on these limitations by focusing on seafarers in the cruise industry. Although the context of this article applies to seafarers of all nationalities, data collection primarily involved Filipinos due to their ubiquity on cruise ships where they comprise close to one third of all crewmembers industry-wide, and because Manila hosts a critical mass of manning (staffing) agencies that could be sourced for interviews (Wu, 2005). This study draws on over 80 semi-structured interviews conducted between February 2007 and March 2009 with various stakeholders associated with cruise ship work. Roughly 60 of these included interviews with workers. In Manila, I conducted interviews with workers in the streets and cafes that surround manning agencies. Additionally, two manning agencies arranged for me to speak privately with various (roughly 20) workers who were presently at the agency conducting business. Also in Manila, I interviewed recruitment managers from eight of the ten major manning agencies that supply the cruise lines with Filipino workers. In Miami, Florida and Charleston, South Carolina, I conducted interviews with workers of various nationalities who had come ashore while their ship had docked in port. Interviews with nonFilipinos helped to balance the data by avoiding an over-reliance on Filipino sources and forge a more holistic image of the cruise industry. As the home port for one particular vessel, Charleston yielded particularly rich interviews. On Saturdays, I was able to 661 meet with many of the same workers over the course of three months during its weekly turnaround. Also in Miami or by phone, I interviewed three corporate human resources managers from major cruise lines, two personnel trainers and two port chaplains. In all cases, names of people and companies are changed or omitted in order to maintain anonymity. This article begins with a discussion of labor flexibilization and how such processes relate to labor concerns in the cruise industry. Here, I pay particular attention to what labor flexibilization means for cruise ship workers, both in terms of their job duties as well as their vulnerability in the workplace and job market. This is followed by an analysis of the limits to labor flexibilization on cruise ships in light of broad demographic and economic changes. The paper concludes with a discussion of future concerns for the industry and its workers. 2. Flexible production and labor flexibility Macroeconomic changes in the past few decades have made the issue of flexible production a central topic for economic geography. Although often loosely defined here I refer to labor flexibilization as a process characterized by labor forms decreasingly constrained by time, space and organization and which are increasingly adaptable to the changes in the marketplace (Villarante, 2006). Flexible work generally involves a move towards non-standard employment characterized as work by contract, organized on an individual rather than collective basis, without full-time benefits (Kalleberg, 2000, 2003; Standing, 1999; Storper and Scott, 1990; Peck, 1996). This coincides with a movement away from unionized workforces and includes the increased use of contractually-based ‘‘contingent’’ workers who can be hired or laid off as business cycles demand (Belous, 1989; Peck and Theodore, 1998, 2001; Peck, 2000; Carnoy et al., 1997; Barker and Christensen, 1998). Operationally, flexible employment involves any work that is either not full-time or where the duration of employment is indefinite (Ozaki, 1999). This numerical flexibility gives companies the ability to quickly and efficiently control staffing levels at minimal costs (Standing, 1999). This shift has been global as temporary staffing services have grown in international importance over the past decade as states have liberalized their labor markets enough to allow temporary contractual work to blossom (Peck et al., 2005; Coe et al., 2007, 2009). In the Global North low-end service positions in cleaning (Aguiar and Ryan, 2009; Savage, 2006), care giving (Rhee and Zabin, 2009), and hospitality (McDowell et al., 2008; Tufts, 2009) have been made increasingly flexible, characterized by part-time, precarious, gendered and often migrant workforces, often provided via staffing agencies. For example, in London this has become something of an industry norm (Lai et al., 2008; McDowell et al., 2007, 2008). Flexibility can also be functional in that workers are increasingly expected to perform a variety of tasks potentially outside their official job duties (Ioannides and Debbage, 1997; Kalleberg, 2003; Storper and Scott, 1990). Companies increase productivity by allowing fewer workers to perform the tasks that might be required of a greater number of individuals in a rigid structure. In such cases, a limit in quantity of workers does not preclude the quality of the individuals who remain, and in fact might generally point toward the employment of higher-skilled people who can better adapt to changing workplaces (Ozaki, 1999). In short, for workers, flexibilization can mean anything from decreased job security, an expansion of job duties, or even flexible working hours. As such, labor flexibility is presented in both positive and negative terms. With regard to the later, flexible work regimes represent increased insecurity for workers (Tombs and Whyte, 2006; Allen 662 W.C. Terry / Geoforum 42 (2011) 660–670 and Henry, 1997). Individuals engaged in nonstandard work absorb some of the financial risks formerly borne by investors (Allen and Henry, 1997). Beck’s (2000, 1992, 1999) theory of an emergent ‘‘risk society’’ highlights the ‘‘privatization of the physical and mental health risks of work [emphasis in original] through spatial flexibilization of wage labor. Norms for the protection of laborers resist public enforcement in decentralized labor forms and the costs for violation or compliance are shifted off onto the workers themselves’’ (Beck, 1992, p. 143). Low skilled, low paid workers at the bottom of the working hierarchy, are subject to a higher degree of risk than those who occupy the better remunerated positions that require more marketable skills (Reimer, 1998). Furthermore, because local labor markets and systems of employment regulation are structured by historical relationships and local patterns of governance, inequality and the assumption of risk are spatially contingent (Mythen, 2005). In other words, where workers come from plays a hand in the sort of working conditions they will accept. For example, migrant workers who support families in low wage countries are often considered by managers to be highly desirable workers because they are more flexible (i.e. they can work overtime without familial constraints), and they will work more when faced with lower wages rather than less in order to earn more money for remittance (Bauder, 2006, p. 21). Their vulnerability stems from their lack of economic opportunities in their home country and do not bargain for better working conditions for fear of either losing a job or not securing one to begin with. Often it is simply easier to source flexible labor outside of the confines of the most advanced economies, usually by offshoring production to less regulated labor markets where labor is cheap and plentiful. Yet although academic work on flexibility in truly globalized labor markets is rather sparse, implied or explicit assumptions suggest that a global labor market creates limitless flexibilities. For example, King (1995, p. 25) suggests that labor migration allows managers access to a ‘‘pool of casual workers capable for virtually any low grade job at any time and at any place’’. Referring to a global labor market, Freeman (2008, p. 2) argues that ‘‘the great doubling’’ of the labor force represented by the entrance of workers from China, India and the former Soviet bloc, ‘‘has shifted the global balance of power to capital’’. Furthermore the influx of low-wage labor allows producers to move or threaten to move in order to secure more favorable and flexible terms. This stance is quite reflective of the way that labor has generally been conceptualized in academic studies and popular literature about the cruise industry (Weaver, 2005a; Garin, 2005; Klein, 2002), where most research assumes a seemingly endless supply of easily exploitable labor flowing from developing countries. 3. Tourism, cruise ships and flexibility Tourism necessitates some flexibility in production due to inconsistent nature of demand, and the fact that, ‘‘tourism services have to be experienced in situ. . .at the point of consumption. . .’’ (Williams and Hall, 2000, p. 13). Seasonality in many tourist destinations has long created a need for businesses to tap flexible pools of labor in areas that have distinguishable ‘‘on and off’’ seasons (Ball, 1988; Baum and Lundtorp, 2001). As many tour operators and hotels shift away from the standardized mass tourism model that relies on a large body of unskilled workers in favor of a more personalized ‘‘post-fordist’’ form of service (Ioannides and Debbage, 1997), there is a growing need for workers who can also display ‘‘skill-intensity, flexibility, and innovativeness’’ (Poon, 1990, p. 117). That said, it is difficult to create generalities about the tourism industry as there are so many types of services that comprise it. Indeed, Ionnides and Debbage (1998, p. 108) suggest that, ‘‘in a sector as amorphous as the travel industry, with so many permeable boundaries and so many diverse linkage arrangements to exploit, a polyglot of coexisting multiple incarnations has evolved, displaying varying rates of flexibility’’. Among these, of course, is the cruise industry with its own peculiarities and requirements. 3.1. A growing industry The contemporary cruise industry has been phenomenally successful. Since the 1960s and 1970s, what was once a small cottage industry of Southeastern Florida has exploded into a global industry with a small number of highly capitalized players. Following two decades of industry consolidation, three corporations, Carnival, Royal Caribbean, and Star Cruises control roughly 85% of the North American market through their namesake and subsidiary lines. With its acquisitions of other lines, Carnival alone commands approximately half of the total market. Since 1990, the total number of cruise passengers has risen by an average of 7.2% a year. Of the 175 million tourists who have cruised in the past two decades, 40% were generated in the most recent 5 years, including well over 14 million in 2010 alone (CLIA, 2010). New ships consistently debut to meet rising demand. As of 2010, 23 ships were due to be delivered to the North American market alone between 2011 and 2014 (CLIA, 2010). The size of ships has increased as well. Each new generation of ships brings a new level of spectacle and economies of scale. Contemporary mega ships, such as Royal Caribbean’s Oasis and Allure of the Seas can hold up to 5400 passengers, although most ships carry between 2000 and 3500. The addition of new ships creates a need for workers to staff them, in addition to those lost to normal attrition. Crew sizes range from over 2100 on the largest ships to 300 on smaller ships, but generally average from 700 to 1500. Crew functions range from ship operation and general maintenance for the deck and engine departments, to hospitality functions in the hotel department. Often described as a floating city, a cruise ship employs a cross section of a small town, from nurses to painters to upholsterers. Ultimately the marriage of both transportation functions and hospitality operations makes the cruise industry fairly unique (Papatheodorou, 2006) and also suggests that a wide range of people with various skill sets are required, which complicates the process of labor recruitment. The labor intensive nature of the industry makes salaries among the greatest costs of operating a cruise ship, exceeding those for fuel or food (Carnival Corporation, 2010; Royal Caribbean Cruises, 2010). Thus, in order to keep costs low, the majority (70%) of the people that work on cruise ships come from low wage countries, primarily in Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe (Fig. 1). The ability to hire inexpensive workers represents enormous cost savings over the employment of workers from wealthier countries. By one estimate, the difference between the use of an all European crew and an Asian crew on a vessel that employs only 24 seafarers is nearly $700,000 per year (Wood, 2006). The savings associated with hiring workers from the developing world are staggering. While cruise ship personnel are ethnically diverse, they are not apportioned randomly. Even a rudimentary analysis of crew composition reveals that they are highly stratified based on ethnicity, race and gender. Certain ethnic groups tend to work in specific roles. Workers from developed countries tend to occupy higher positions within a ship’s organizational hierarchy. These tend to be well remunerated and have either greater responsibility, better working conditions, or some combination of the two. The rest of the workers, especially those in positions involving more menial tasks, almost universally come from the developing world. Much of this work is also hidden from passengers in areas that are only accessible to employees. A union representative named Philip W.C. Terry / Geoforum 42 (2011) 660–670 663 Fig. 1. Cruise labor force by nationality, adapted from Wu (2005). described it this way, ‘‘the deeper you go in the belly of the ship, the darker the crew. It’s OK to have a Filipino subserviently cleaning your room, but sitting down at your dinner table [something an officer might do], they’d rather have an Italian or a Norwegian, or an American. Go figure, they’re not going to admit to that, they’re going to give you all kinds of excuses, but that’s pretty much what they do’’. Their hours also tend to be longer and their pay is much lower. Cruise lines claim that they do not pay their workers different salaries based strictly on nationality. Rather, salaries are determined by position rather than nationality. However, because certain nationalities tend to dominate certain positions (such as Filipinos in the deck and engine department or Indians in security), wage stratification based on job duty effectively runs along ethnic lines. These social disparities paint the cruise industry in a light highly reminiscent of colonialism (Chin, 2008a,b). 3.2. Flags of convenience Cruise lines are able to employ such an ethnically diverse crew by using flags of convenience (FOC). FOC’s are essentially open registrations that provide ship owners with strategic flexibility of operations by eliminating restrictions on crew and owner citizenship, reducing or eliminating certain taxes, and drastically reducing other forms of regulation on environmental and labor controls (DeSombre, 2006). For example, an FOC ship registered (flagged) in the Bahamas may be built in Finland, owned by an American, crewed by a mixture of Asians, Europeans, and Latin Americans, subject to Bahamian regulations. Conversely, a ship registered in the United States (not an open registry) must be built in the United States, employ only licensed US officers and at least a 75% American crew, while following US labor and environmental regulations. From a human resources perspective, FOC’s give companies a distinct operational advantage: the ability to hire workers from wherever they choose, unlike many land-based operations that must contend with restrictive immigration requirements for transnational workers (Chin, 2008a, p. 20). Open registrations grant cruise lines one of the most globalized and flexible labor markets of any industry (Amante, 2004; Dimitrova, 2010; Chin, 2008b). Not surprisingly most shipping companies have ‘‘offshored’’ to these regulatory havens. Operating in a labor-intensive industry, cruise lines overwhelmingly elect to flag ships in countries such as the Bahamas and Liberia that had until recently adopted relatively few (13% and 30% respectively) ILO labor agreements. DeSombre (2006, p. 48) categorizes the Bahamian registry as a regulatory niche with a poor record of worker protection. Unsurprisingly, seafarer unions and worker welfare organizations view the FOC system as a major impediment toward protecting workers’ interests, effectively inviting a return of the sort of brutal conditions that characterized seafaring until the 20th century. For example, the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), a global labor association that attempts to promote worldwide standards, has been campaigning for an overhaul of the FOC system for over 50 years (Lillie, 2004). In their view, FOC’s allow companies to bypass state regulation by cutting ties between the country of ownership and country of registry (ITF, 2008). In many cases, enforcement of existing regulations is also lax on FOC ships. Historically, the cruise industry itself has faced many allegations of seafarer abuse, from abandoning workers in ports following injury (Norman, 2004) to forcing workers to sign new contracts for lower pay only once they are aboard the ship. This has prompted the ITF to wage a ‘‘Sweatship’’ campaign to address problematic aspects of cruise ship employment, like low unionization rates, low pay, and long hours (Mather, 2002). Such rhetoric highlights the enormous potential for exploitation that the FOC system engenders and the subsequent difficulties associated with protecting a polyglot crew. Indeed many workers interviewed for this project had no knowledge that they were working under a collectively bargained contract (many, such as Carnival and Disney employees were not), attesting to the general place of unions among cruise employees. In reality, the effectiveness of unions is limited by the individualized contractual and short-term nature of seafarer employment, as well as the location of work. Seafarers thus are considered the most difficult working group to organize on a national scale (Dimitrova, 2010). On a global scale, the ITF, with its worldwide network of ship inspectors, has been the most active in attempting to set a global standard of protection for all seafarers, but their efforts are limited by the scale of the shipping industry. Only recently has the international community attempted to create globally enforceable guidelines for worker protection with the ILO Maritime Labour Convention (2006) which is expected to go into force in 2012. The MLC consolidates the many various, unevenly adopted ILO regulations on seafaring and gives port states the right to enforce them. It should theoretically serve to limit the sort of nefarious practices that have become endemic to the FOC system by forcing each company from each flag state to submit to the global standard. 3.3. Cruise workers as flexible labor Seafarers are contingent workers; most are recruited via manning agencies that shipping companies tap to access local labor markets (Bonacich and Wilson, 2008). Formal employment with cruise lines only spans the 3–12 months that workers are actively employed under the individual labor contract. While it is common 664 W.C. Terry / Geoforum 42 (2011) 660–670 for cruise workers to call the 4–8 week period between contracts a ‘‘vacation’’, in strict terms it is a scheduled period of unemployment. This system allows the cruise lines to examine the performance of an employee and in the case of underperforming workers, eliminate them by electing not to renew the contract. Similarly, if the company is experiencing an oversupply of workers, they can reduce employment numbers by waiting a short while for workers to rotate off of the ships. In the Philippines for example: . . .the manning agencies and shipowners have succeeded in making seafaring a contractual and casual employment. Being hired does not guarantee that a seafarer will continue to be hired since under the existing government policy, the shipowner or manning agency is not required to continue employing the seafarer after a contract is finished (ISAC, 2004, p. 9). The vacation period also indirectly allows cruise lines to minimize the costs associated with medical care. By law, ship owners are required to provide medical care to seafarers during the time they are employed under contract. It is in the interest of cruise lines to determine that workers are healthy before renewing contracts. In most cases, workers are required to submit to a medical evaluation. If they are not declared healthy they will not be allowed back on the ships. In the Philippines, manning agents report that various conditions such as hypertension are automatic grounds for rejection. One agency described rejecting workers who take medications, even those that have been prescribed for conditions developed while on board the ship. The manning agencies cite the cost of medical care and repatriation as the chief reason they follow such strict guidelines. This is also a major reason why most manning agencies will only recruit young workers. Multiple agencies reported 31 as the maximum age of recruitment for new workers. In the case of injury while under contract, the contract itself also shields cruise lines from risk by limiting the amount of damages that can be awarded to workers, and insuring that their cases are arbitrated in their country of origin rather than the United States (Terry, 2009). This suggests that workers absorb some of the economic risks associated with the operation of a cruise vessel, which reflects the theoretical relationship between labor flexibility and risk assumption. Medical scenarios are not the only ones where prospective cruise workers face pre-employment risks. Many seafarers take loans to pay labor recruiters in order to receive placement on board a ship. In the Philippines, the government forbids placement fees, yet anecdotal evidence suggests that some under-the-table deals do still occur. In other countries such as Indonesia and Nicaragua placement fees are endemic. For example, Budi, an Indonesian assistant cruise director described feeling lucky because a personal contact in Miami helped him to get a job on the ship without having to pay a bribe. According to Budi, Indonesians pay around $1200. He has not been able to avoid fees altogether, however. After a copy of his work evaluation was never received by the manning agency, they attempted to force him to pay the standard bribe. Eventually Budi agreed to pay $200 as a peace offering, but now he is expected to pay this much every time he returns home. While cruise lines report attempts to curtail such activities by terminating relationships with manning agencies that charge fees to prospective workers, nefarious practices persist in some regions. Cruise lines’ H.R. managers describe frustration with this form of corruption, but meanwhile acknowledge that graft is often a local norm in certain places like Eastern Europe. With placement fees yet to be universally eradicated in the cruise industry, many workers take on debt for the prospect of a higher income. In such cases, the unexpected release from employment before the repayment of a loan can be a significant financial burden. On the ships, flexibility is manifested in other ways, reflecting the extent to which workers allow the ships to function at such a high level. Most positions on a cruise ship do not require functional flexibility but workers must be very flexible with working hours. Ships carry a limited number of workers so when more work is required the only solution is to extract more time from the crew. This was a common occurrence according to Ernesto, a maintenance worker specializing in (refrigeration) air conditioning: Yeah eight [hours] is what’s on the contract, but ten [is normal]. . . almost every night, in one week maybe two times, three times, we have an emergency at night. So you take already your rest and then they call you and whether you like it or not you have to go. . .if one section is broke, 100 passengers complain. So you have to keep that one until you finish. Thus life on a cruise ship requires that workers be perpetually prepared to work in order to meet the needs of the day. For the entire length of the 4–10 month contract, workers receive no days off while working on average 70–100 h per week. As a result, most cruise ship jobs are emotionally and physically draining. From day to day, cruise workers follow replicable patterns according to a strict schedule. When passengers leave their cabins during the day, beds are made and floors are vacuumed; during dinner, beds are turned down. When passengers disembark from the ship, stewards must refit the cabins for the imminent arrival of the next group of passengers the same afternoon. A disrupted agenda upsets the tight schedule that workers are required to maintain, in some cases resulting in a financial loss for the workers. For example, Philip, a Filipino cabin steward, reported that he often has to pay other off-duty workers to help finish cleaning his set of cabins on time. On one day, the ship was two hours late returning to port. Yet the departure time to go back to sea was only moved back one hour, reducing the time required to turn over the cabins. Philip claimed to have ‘‘no choice’’ but to pay someone to help him finish or face a possible reprimand from his supervisor. Another cabin steward reported that in the course of a month he might pay up to $700 for help from other crew members, effectively reducing his salary from roughly $2500 to $1800 per month. The late arrival of the ship was completely out of this particular worker’s control, yet in this case he bore the financial burden of maintaining customer satisfaction. Informal shadow economies like this are common on ships as a means to supplement the formal structure of employment. With certain staff earning a majority of their wages from tips,1 cruise lines can lower the wage burden and build revenue through fares and other consumptive activities like onboard drinking and shopping. Meanwhile workers absorb some of the risks associated with passenger dissatisfaction or ships that sail below passenger capacity, likely scenarios leading to below average gratuities. The dismay over this arrangement was expressed by Elena, a Romanian staff member. While clearly under-employed on the cruise ship where she was hired to paint faces (she was trained as a chemical engineer), Elena was comfortable with her position as long as she was receiving what she considered to be fair remuneration. Her income relied heavily on tips in addition to a $400 per month salary. Unfortunately she worked on a small ship for a company that does not cater to children, which curbed her ability to earn decent tips. In this case, the costs of a poor management decision were borne by the worker instead of the company. Elena was visibly unhappy in appearance and demeanor. Shortly after I met her, Elena returned to her husband and child in Romania at the end of her contract, vowing not to return. Tips can also play a role in shadow systems of graft with ship-board managerial hierarchies involved in receiving payments from waiters hoping to secure the tables 1 This applies only to certain positions including, restaurant servers, wine stewards, bar tenders, and room stewards. Other workers, such as maintenance staff, are salaried. W.C. Terry / Geoforum 42 (2011) 660–670 that represent the best possibility of obtaining larger gratuities. The examples presented here are a mere subset of the sort of experiences that many seafarers encounter, yet they are highly illustrative of how cruise lines benefit from a flexible workforce. Similar stories are revealed in most conversations with workers. They also suggest that life on cruise ships is difficult due to high levels of stress over very long periods with little time off. The worst cases, from manipulating pay after a worker’s arrival on a ship, to abandonment of an injured worker in ports amount to outright exploitation (Klein, 2001, 2002, 2005; Mather, 2002; Terry, 2009; Weaver, 2005b). Such conditions reflect that only certain groups will ultimately be willing to accept a life at sea. 4. The paradox of the human resources challenge For cruise lines, the benefits of foreign registries are undeniable. Yet despite the ability of cruise lines to hire from almost any national labor market they target, human resource managers throughout the industry are increasingly worried about their future ability to recruit and retain workers for their vessels, enough to be the focus of a conference session at the 2008 Seatrade annual industry tradeshow. This contrasts sharply with most newspaper accounts, pro-worker publicity campaigns and academic treatments of labor relationships in the cruise industry. Most of these suggest that cruise lines utilize their globalized labor market with relative ease in order to find the right balance of workers with both the skills and eagerness to take on a life at sea. For example, Weaver (2005a, p. 22) argues that the international labor market represents a ‘‘worldwide surplus of unemployed and under-employed individuals who are quite prepared to work on board cruise ships’’. Garin (2005, p. 192) describes jobs almost universally beginning, ‘‘at the end of a long line in one of the world’s poor and desperate corners: India, Indonesia, Russia, Honduras, China, Haiti,’’ the typical labor-rich recruiting grounds for most cruise lines. The fact that this has generally been the case for decades creates an assumption that cruise lines need only look to the developing world to easily staff their ships. In this light, a potential worker shortage seems paradoxical. Ironically, however, the cruise industry’s success creates a looming problem for human resources managers. As the industry grows, the ever increasing size of ships and the speed of their production are met with a requirement to staff them. Considering that most individual worker contracts last less than a full year, it is necessary to over-recruit for each position in order to fill the time periods when workers have returned home for vacation. With some variability, the common logic is that for each position on a ship, cruise lines must retain 1.5 workers in their rotational pool. With an actual unlimited labor surplus finding these workers would not pose a problem. Yet a glimpse at the geography of labor recruitment reveals some obstacles. One is that cruise lines must now compete with hotels and airlines for their labor force. In recent years, hoteliers worldwide have begun to pay specific attention to human capital as the primary driver of customer satisfaction. In fact, hospitality managers cite attraction and retention as their primary operational concern (Enz, 2009). The cruise lines found that they could achieve high levels of customer satisfaction while dividing specific roles on their ships between the less numerous workers from traditional wealthy seafaring countries (such as Japan, Greece, Norway) and the majority of workers that come from the low-wage countries. One human resources manager at a major cruise line, Tony, reported that certain places have long met the staffing needs of the industry, but the incursion of hotels into the same global labor market is creating unwelcome competition for qualified workers: 665 The thing that’s also been a huge impact is traditionally it was the cruise lines that were going to India and the Philippines. Certainly in the Philippines their number one export is their labor. But to some extent we had somewhat of an exclusivity there. But as other large hotel-based organizations have been struggling in expanding, they found out the great little secret of what we’ve been doing in the cruise industry. And now they’ve started to come in and recruit out of the same pools. So as we’ve gotten bigger we’ve also gotten other people coming in and competing for that same pool and there’s just not enough there so we’ve been forced to some extent to look for other pools of people and then also as you become more of a global product, there are different skill levels, different languages, different mixes of personnel that you would like to have on your ships to service our clients. As Tony’s comments suggest, individual countries have a limited number of people with the right skill set to qualify them for a job on a cruise ship, and increasingly these workers are distributed in other land-based enterprises. For example, between 1990 and 2006 The United States has seen a 124% increase in the migrant population working in hospitality (Capps et al., 2010). Hotels and restaurants in the UK have long looked to migrants to fill lowend service positions not sufficiently filled by the local markets (Ruhs and Anderson, 2010). Yet much of the competition for labor now comes from Asia where tourism has grown in recent years. For example, Macao is currently earning a reputation as the Las Vegas of Far East with at least two hotels set to add 22,000 new workers in 2011 (Quintã, 2010). Dubai and Abu Dhabi have aggressively pursued tourism as a diversification strategy and almost entirely use transnational workers to staff hotels and resorts (Ho, 2008). Newer airlines from the gulf states have also begun to use Southeast Asian workers (The Economist, 2010). One Filipino hospitality trainer suggested that although ‘‘poaching’’ of talented workers from the cruise industry was not a new phenomenon, the improving economies of Singapore, Australia and China have increased the pressure (Isip, 2010). The challenge for human resources staff lies not simply in supplying warm bodies who can be available 24 h a day for whatever crisis awaits them, but in finding enough workers with the requisite skills and a willingness to perform their tasks at a high level. Labor recruiters cannot simply pluck a person from the streets of Manila and expect them to be able to prepare a bouillabaisse, rewire a malfunctioning light fixture, or even wait tables. They must first have some measure of experience or talent. On the surface, it seems illogical to suggest that there might be difficulty in cruise lines finding workers in the hospitality-based segment of the industry, where many positions have often been considered unskilled. There has been some recognition that at the minimum many jobs in hospitality require some level of training and experience and therefore can be called ‘‘middle-skilled’’ (Capps et al., 2010). Certainly, many hospitality positions, such as those in the galley, do require skills and experience, while others that involve more interaction with guests require equally important ‘‘soft’’ skills (Baum, 1996; Burns, 1997). Soft skills, in this regard, are a code for any kind of interpersonal communication skills that are essential to providing responsive customer service. Seafarers working directly with passengers must have excellent interpersonal communication skills; including anything from a sort of social grace to an ability to work without betraying an outward appearance of stress. Interactive service workers on cruise ships are the quintessential ‘‘emotional laborers’’, people who modify or even fake their emotional display in accordance with company customer satisfaction goals (Grandey, 2000). Indeed it has been noted that restaurant work involves an element of performance (Crang, 2004), which cruise ship staff has mastered particularly well (Weaver, 2005a). While the question of whether or not 666 W.C. Terry / Geoforum 42 (2011) 660–670 emotional work is necessarily ‘‘skilled’’ remains an open debate in academic literature (see Payne, 2006), manning agencies and human resource managers for cruise lines actively desire workers that can actively manage their emotions. In this regard, Tony, the aforementioned human resources manager describes the principal job of labor recruiters is to find workers who possess a ‘‘hospitality gene’’ and a flair for service. For marine departments recruitment is especially acute. Across the entire shipping industry, a dearth of qualified officers is projected to worsen to a deficit of roughly 84,000 workers by 2012 (Mwakio, 2010). In what has been an ethnically stratified work environment, officer positions have historically been filled by workers from traditional seafaring countries in the global north, most of which have rapidly aging populations. Manning agents, cruise line insiders, and seafarer advocates all agree that few young people in these countries are interested in serving for months at a time when equally lucrative careers are available at home (Hand, 2009). The problem is severe enough that some European countries have introduced tax incentives to shipping companies that are able to recruit and retain their seafarers, and shipping companies have slowly begun to hire officers from labor-rich countries like the Philippines (Leggate, 2004). Whereas cargo shipping companies have been proactive in hiring Asians as officers, cruise lines have been slow to react to the changing marketplace. Reasons for this disparity are purely speculative, but many workers and labor recruiters suggested an element of racism during interviews, one going so far as to reveal his own company’s bias by remarking that Filipinos are not suited to officer class positions due to a perceived lack of attention to detail and need for supervision. Another recruiter suggested that western passengers do not want to see Asians in positions of responsibility. Despite this, I did meet a few Asian officers during interviews and most Filipino manning agencies reported placing a small number of officers on cruise ships. Yet, the change may be slow if cruise lines are reluctant to hire Asian officers and the availability of European officers stabilizes. Michael, a human resource specialist working for a rival to Tony’s cruise line, suggests that the special needs of the cruise industry make it especially difficult to find the correct kind of workers: I think whenever you are hiring for a unique industry, there are challenges. We’re not hiring taxi drivers, so there’s always a challenge to get the right people for the positions. There may be a lot of potential people, but you’ve got to get people who are willing to travel and live on the ship and have the knowledge and experience, so it’s a challenge. This challenge is particularly reflected at manning agencies. In the Philippines, all potential workers are filtered through a rigorous screening process. Manning agencies are particularly strict in weeding out candidates that show any sort of weakness. The list of requirements are long (see Table 1 for an example of the stringent requirements from one manning agency in Manila) and most applicants fail at some rudimentary level. The first prerequisite for on a cruise ship is the ability to speak English. This is a standard requirement across the entire shipping industry because English serves as a lingua franca. With workers representing such great diversity, safety concerns dictate that all workers can communicate effectively with one another and passengers. Workers who have contact with passengers are expected to command English with total fluency. At one manning agency, any hint of broken English is cause for the rejection of an application. Generally, manning agencies try to recruit workers with a postsecondary education, based on the theory that highly educated workers will be sensitive to other cultures, thus allowing them to better respond to customers’ needs. In addition to having a college Table 1 Typical prerequisites required by filipino manning agencies. Category Prerequisite Physical characteristics Height Male: 50 700 Female: 50 400 Age Under 26 w/o prior ship experience Under 31 with ship experience Appearance Attractive, not overweight, no deformities Fluent English (no exceptions) College degree One year in 5 star hotel Compliant, docile, calm, outgoing (psychometric testing) Perfect Language requirements Education Experience Personality Health education or at least some formal education in a program geared either toward seafaring or hospitality, prospective applicants must have at least a year of experience working in a five-star hotel or similar operation. Physical appearance also plays a role in recruitment. Workers in hospitality positions must be attractive and tall. Manning agencies in the Philippines require men to be at least 50 700 and women to be 50 400 . In a country where the average male is 50 400 and the average female is five feet tall, a height requirement categorically removes a majority of the potential labor pool. One manning agent suggested that such practices were not necessarily commanded by cruise lines, but rather, manning agencies often select candidates based on what they feel cruise lines want. Others mentioned that cruise lines want taller workers because they look better, but allow the manning agencies to use their discretion in this area. Another admitted that the recruitment policies in manning agencies throughout the Philippines, although necessary in his eyes, would be considered highly discriminatory or even illegal in the United States. Finally, manning agencies report that the personality of each seafarer is individually checked to ensure that they will display the right balance of passivity and extroversion. While applicants are given formal psychometric tests to check personality types, labor recruiters also develop their own techniques to evaluate interpersonal skill. For example, one recruiter reported that during interviews he attempts to anger the prospective employee. If the applicant responds with any sign of aggression he or she is immediately removed from consideration. One manning agency even reported that they make sure white people are present during these interviews to add pressure and see how a Filipino will respond to someone who could be a potential passenger. The result of such strict requirements is that the vast majority of workers who apply to work on cruise ships are never hired. At one manning agency, 50–60 applications are received per day out of which 3 or 4 will be short-listed for future consideration. Out of the thirty to forty applicants short-listed in a given month only two or three will receive a job offer. The rest are deemed unqualified. This is typical. Although there is a clear absolute labor surplus throughout the Philippines, cruise lines cherry-pick the very best candidates and argue that the remainder do not meet the standards for the kind of workers they want. 5. Geographic limits to labor market flexibility It is becoming increasingly clear that cruise lines have been dependent on their ability to find workers that are both inexpensive and skilled, through the machinations a flexible global labor W.C. Terry / Geoforum 42 (2011) 660–670 market. On one hand, cruise lines, like other tourism enterprises ‘‘are able to shift some risk and uncertainty to their employees (i.e. contract work, preferably on low wages). But they also have to try and retain or attract workers with experience and skills, who can provide continuity in work practices and quality’’ (Shaw and Williams, 2004, p. 79). This perspective guides us to consider the tensions that cruise lines face in finding qualified workers. Even in long time labor supplying countries like the Philippines, as H.R. manager Tony suggests, it is becoming more difficult to find qualified workers as economic conditions improve: The standard of living in the Philippines hasn’t accelerated upwards as fast [as India], but it is a contained area. There’s only so many people and they’re having more and more choices. . . Internally they are developing more of a tourist destination market there, they have a lot more restaurants; they are building up the infrastructure to consume some of their hospitality graduates. Those internal hospitality graduates aren’t going to be making as much money staying local than going offshore but it gives them a chance once they’ve been offshore and want to come back and have maybe more of a normal life, they’ll make less money, but they can stay in the hospitality industry which didn’t exist before, or someone who has no interest to leave their country maybe 6–8 months at a time says well, I’m going to try to develop a hotel career within my own country. Cruise lines are concerned that similar trends are being reproduced throughout the world. If the countries from which the cruise industry has drawn labor for the past 30 years become too wealthy and potential workers are no longer willing to leave for many months at a time, the cruise lines will be faced with an inability to staff their ships in the way that they have grown accustomed. As H.R. manager Michael suggests, ‘‘Lower end industries can get away with more inexperienced people’’, but the cruise industry cannot. This contrasts sharply with theories of ‘‘capitalist triumphalism’’, where globalization allows footloose capital to have its own way vis-à-vis labor (Munck, 2002, p. 12). Tony continues his analysis by describing the impact of other opportunities for potential cruise ship workers in Eastern Europe: For the most part if you go into Germany, France and Italy to recruit, you’re not going to find it. . . Now we’re saying ‘where else in the world can we go?’. In the 90’s, after the fall of the Berlin wall and the crash of the Soviet Union, it opened up Eastern Europe. And Eastern Europe did have in many cases a lot of different language skills and people were desperate to get out of there, and they did have some base level skills in the service industry and we were very happy to have them. But that pool is now feeding much of Western Europe. And some of our markets in the early 90’s have become much tougher, meaning we used to recruit a lot very, very heavily in Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, the Ukraine. But if you go to places like the UK, go to London now, go get served in a restaurant in London, you’ll find every nationality except English serving the English. The standard of living and minimum wages in these West European countries it’s become very attractive for these Eastern Europeans to move over and so they’re drawing out a lot of these great service personnel away from us. . . What was once a good strong market for us, hasn’t completely dried up for us, but it’s become much, much tougher. So we continue to look around the world. This analysis is corroborated by studies that have shown how Western European hotels have indeed become significant destinations for Eastern European workers (see McDowell et al., 2007, 2008; Ruhs and Anderson, 2010). It is clear that there are limits to traditional notions of labor market flexibility, and that these limits are essentially rooted in 667 places. Cruise lines require a globally flexible labor market, but one that can deliver people with the right qualities and low cost. This is only found in places where people are desperate for work, but where the educational systems produce people that can relate to mostly Western passengers. The industry’s lack of recruitment in China and Anglophone Africa illustrates this point. Recruiters cite the difficulty of finding Chinese workers with an advanced ability to speak English (Zhao and Amante, 2005) and an understanding of the nature of hospitality work. They also describe the difficulty of integrating Chinese seafarers with the rest of the crew. The growth of the Chinese domestic fleet has also limited the number of seafarers available for FOC ships. Similarly, as they see it, Sub-Saharan Africa currently does not provide workers with the skills that cruise lines require. Furthermore, peoples with the skills required to work at sea would most likely be employed on land first due to talent shortages there (Inter Press Service, 2009). In contrast, Filipino culture has been highly influenced by American culture over the past century, making service in the North American market an easier transition, as most Filipinos have at least a rudimentary understanding of the English language and a great many speak it perfectly (Zhao and Amante, 2005). Also a discursive stereotyping that positions Southeast Asian culture as distinctly service oriented is highly notable in conversations with workers, recruiters and managers (Chin, 2008b; Milde, 2009). Hiring Filipinos is also relatively streamlined with an entrenched manning industry, and a state apparatus that actively promotes sending workers abroad as a keystone economic policy (Rodriguez, 2010; Tyner, 2004). Hence it is through a combination of cultural, political and economic forces that countries like the Philippines are major recruitment centers while China and Sub-Saharan Africa are not. The industry has in fact already reinforced why it is worried about a more constrained labor market. Beginning in 2004 Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL) created a subsidiary, Norwegian Cruise Lines America (NCLA), to operate in Hawaiian waters. These ships required United States registration due to protectionist cabotage laws that disallow foreign flagged vessels to transport passengers between US ports. Thus FOC ships were effectively required to sail to an intervening foreign port (Ensenada, Mexico) at some point before disembarking passengers, while NCLA ships could stay close to Hawaii. With a US flag, NCLA’s ships carried a fully unionized American crew and complied with US labor regulations such as minimum wages and limitations on working hours. The results were disastrous; customer service suffered, poorly trained workers left the ships due to the stress of the job and costs exceeded revenue. NCLA was able to stabilize the staffing situation somewhat by developing a training academy to acclimate new workers, yet costs remained high (Jenkins, 2005). By 2008, NCL removed, renamed and reflagged two of the three ships to serve other markets. In 4 years, the company lost over $250 million at a time when Carnival Corporation was recording roughly one billion dollars in annual profit (McAvoy, 2008). In the third quarter of 2008, NCL posted its first profit since 2006. That this corresponded to the repositioning of the two NCLA ships is no coincidence. Ironically, the recent global economic downturn has also helped to illuminate the limits to flexibility. With fewer people traveling, hotels have reduced their workforces. In follow-up interviews conducted during the height of the recession, Tony and Michael revealed that the loosening of the labor markets due to the weakening competition for workers from land-based operations is currently making recruitment much easier for them in the short-term. However, both were clear that they view this as a temporary trend; eventually with a worldwide economic recovery they expect to find the market once again under-producing qualified workers. This assumption has led some cruise lines to consider establishing or working more closely with training academies in 668 W.C. Terry / Geoforum 42 (2011) 660–670 order to develop workers rather than just hunt for them. One such academy, run by a manning agency, already exists in Manila. Its programs include culinary, restaurant service, bartending and housekeeping courses, and facilities to train in full scale mock cabins and kitchens. Another was founded in Jakarta in 2008 in partnership with Costa Cruise line. Such programs suggest that cruise lines seem to be increasingly willing to invest in places, a tacit recognition that as the old geographies of labor recruitment shift, flexibilities associated with further offshoring may be limited. 6. A crewing concern With this article I have argued that an assumption of flexibilities in a global labor market ignores the unevenness and cultural differences that encapsulate contemporary geography. This paper also answers repeated calls to build stronger connections between economic geography and tourism geographies (Ioannides, 1995, 2006; Judd, 2006), refocus critical attention on the ‘‘world of work and associated organization of production,’’ (Bianchi, 2009, p. 498) and reiterates that the concerns of service industries like tourism are highly illustrative of broader economic processes. In particular, this article has shown that the ability to find workers who will accept risks and difficulties associated with working life are an essential element that allow cruise lines to operate efficiently and effectively at low cost. Yet this ability is based on a very particular geography. In short, the cruise industry is reliant on global inequalities, skill sets found in local labor markets and cultural alignment with western expectations to produce a very specific type of worker. Although the cruise industry has heretofore benefitted from globalization and the ability to tap into a global labor market, the local geographies that create suitable workers are in constant flux; what was once easy becomes more challenging as typical source countries of the past couple decades yield fewer skilled workers. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that the contemporary cruise industry could not exist in the form it currently takes without the benefit of a highly flexible global labor market. Cruise ships provide high levels of service and customer satisfaction with relatively low fares only because open registries give them the flexibility to recruit globally and allow them to keep salary costs in line. Indeed, cruises are often considered among the greatest ‘‘values’’ for potential vacationers, a suggestion often repeated by industry boosters (Davidson, 2009), and born out through the industry’s strong performance in a historically bad recession. Generally not mentioned in such praise is why fares can remain so affordable to such a wide customer base. We are left to speculate on effects should major recruitment centers such as the Philippines fail to deliver workers at a competitive cost. It should be noted that costs to hire Filipinos are already slightly higher than workers from other low wage countries due to their relatively high level of skill and a state apparatus that attempts to protect them with minimum standards. As a result, some cruise lines have lowered Filipino representation somewhat on ships in recent years (Milde, 2009). This suggests that as labor source countries change, cruise lines seek a spatial fix. The question remains, however, of just how they will approach future constraints on their current recruiting pools and to what extent a spatial fix is perpetually possible. As previously noted, cruise lines have begun to invest in human capital in the form of training academies, which allows them to broaden the base of potential recruits in existing and trusted markets. This appears as a sort of hedge against a tightening labor market should other potential geographic centers for recruitment fail to emerge. Here the lack of recruitment in Anglophone Africa is telling. Despite a growing and inexpensive labor force, the industry has failed to show major interest in the region mostly due to a perceived skills deficit, but potentially also due to a cultural bias. Also in question is the highly selective recruitment process that advances only the best candidates, but effectively shrinks the overall pool of candidates. If the market tightens considerably due to demographic changes and economic development in source countries, cruise lines may be faced with the possibility of becoming less selective toward hospitality positions, something they are loathe to do. Deck and engine departments have even fewer options as such positions require a very specific skill set that requires a great deal of training, and licensure in the case of officers. Furthermore cruise lines must currently compete with all forms of shipping to recruit their officers who are globally in short supply. As other external conditions change they will continue to impact the nature of employment in the cruise industry. The new ILO Maritime Labour Convention, which may limit the number of hours that can be worked by crew members, may create an even greater tension between finding cheap labor and finding qualified labor. Indeed, Royal Caribbean has acknowledged that the MLC will most likely increase their operating costs, albeit by an unknown amount (Royal Caribbean, 2010). However, despite being a rare example of a brake on neoliberal globalization, its future impacts are as of yet unknown. The rising cost of fuel will also continue to challenge the profitability of the industry and undoubtedly require the lines to examine their crewing policies. How investors, passengers, or employees in the form of lower wages will absorb these costs is a question for the future. This suggests that larger questions loom over worker protection in this industry. It must be acknowledged that the cruise industry does not have a rosy history in terms of worker treatment despite any recent improvements. Life at sea has always presented numerous difficulties to seafarers which in turn has only made it attractive to groups with few other options. One potential source of hope for workers however is that for an industry that is facing a skills shortage, making sure that workers are physically, financially and mentally secure are all key ingredients needed to grow and retain the potential pool of workers beyond those in relatively poor areas. After all, shanghaiing, pressing and crimping are no longer options to force or trick workers onto ships, and therefore jobs at sea must remain attractive to at least some groups. How the cruise industry will adapt to the human resources challenge will reveal a good deal more about the nuances that exist in managing the most globalized and flexible labor forces. Whatever the outcome, it is clear that human resources are spatially contingent and common assumptions about outsourcing are usually overly simplistic. Our understandings of spatial fixes and global labor markets in all industries must shift accordingly. Acknowledgements International portions of data collection for this research project were supported by the Walker Institute of International and Area Studies at the University of South Carolina. I warmly thank Amy Mills, Ed Carr and Caroline Nagel for comments and guidance throughout this project. I owe many thanks to Anne Terry for proofreading various drafts and providing an incredible amount of moral support. Three anonymous reviewers and Katie Willis also provided a wealth of suggestions which helped to improve the paper immensely. Finally, I must profess heartfelt gratitude to an anonymous gatekeeper in Manila who opened so many doors for me. This paper would have been impossible without him. 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