Rethinking labour risk in global production networks: Resilience strategies of cruise ship workers in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The collapse of the global industry due to the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated how precarious the livelihoods of workers embedded in globalised industries are. In the global production network literature, moments of crisis have been addressed in the debate on ‘GPN risk’. While this debate has contributed to our understanding of firms’ risk mitigation strategies, much less attention has been paid to workers’ resilience strategies in the face of risk.To fill this gap, this paper rethinks the concept of ‘labour risk’ by including the perspective of the workers. Drawing on concepts from labour geography, the article sheds light on the resilience strategies of cruise ship workers from Indonesia during the COVID-19 crisis. We interviewed twenty-two cruise ship workers, two non-governmental organisations, and two political authorities to analyse how workers used different resilience strategies (coping, adaptive and transformative) to respond to the risk outsourcing practices of cruise ship companies.Our study shows that workers cope with the crisis by relying on family relations, virtual community networks, and the local labour market. In a few cases, workers followed adaptive strategies of opening their own businesses and leaving the cruise industry. These results emphasise that workers’ resilience strategies play a central role in reproducing exploitative capital accumulation regimes underpinning global production networks.