Lives in Peril: Profit or Safety in the Global Maritime Industry?

Lives in Peril demonstrates how and why seafarers are a vulnerable group of workers. It argues they are made so by the organisation and structure of their employment; the prioritisation of profit over safety by the actors that engage and control their labour; the limits of enforcement of the regulatory framework that is in place to protect them; and by their weakness as collective actors in relation to capital. The consequences of this vulnerability are seen in data on their occupationally-related morbidity and mortality - evidence that probably only represents a partial picture of the actual extent of the physical, mental and emotional harm resulting from work at sea. This volume’s central argument is that this situation is likely to remain broadly unchanged as long as global maritime governance and regulation remains in thrall to the neo-liberal economic and political arguments that drive globalisation, and fails to enforce regulatory standards more robustly.

David Walters is Professor of Work Environment at Cardiff University, UK. He has written extensively on various aspects of the work environment, including employee representation and consultation on health and safety, the politics of health and safety at work, governance and regulation of health and safety, and chemical risks and health and safety in small firms.

Nick Bailey is a lecturer in Social Sciences at Cardiff University, UK. As a former ship’s officer and with ten years research experience in the Seafarers International Research Centre (SIRC), his work has focused on issues of health, safety and risk in this highly globalised industry.