'dirty Hands' of the Global Supply Chain: Southeast Asian Maritime Workers across Globalized Asian Economies

Indonesian, Filipino, Vietnamese and Chinese are the new workers of global supply chain capitalism in Asia. The transformations of Asian economies and labor markets significantly channel Southeast Asian migrant labor into two emerging economic sectors: fishing and shipping. These workers’ migration and labor pathways align with the shifting circuits of the global supply chain. They daily move the world, playing a crucial role in driving global trade, yet facing severe precarity. Sometimes, they are even victims of forced labor, smuggled as crew members. Young, with varying levels of education, these workers faceethno-racial hierarchies aboard vessels, confined to lower-skilled positions—the "dirty hands" of container ships. On fishing and commercial vessels, their labor experiences are marked by floating work tasks and schedules, fragile legal status, and delayed wages. In ports or across the ocean, they remain largely invisible. This paper seeks to explore the daily realities of labor and work on fishing and shipping vessels. What are the labor migration pathways for Southeast Asian maritime migrant workers today? How do these migrant seafarers and fishers experience globalized labor regimes? Drawing on ethnographic methods, including 100 interviews with Indonesian, Filipino, Vietnamese, and Chinese workers, participant observation of their daily work on vessels and in ports, this paper examines migrants' maritime labor and migration pathways, experiences of inequality, and the socio-economic strategies to cope with precarity. It illustrates precarious work experiences and practices, highlighting how these migrants' marginalization serves as a mechanism for exploitable, flexible labor regimes within neoliberal economies. Through fresh empirical evidence, it contributes to the contemporary scholarly debates about migrant labor precarity in global capitalism, and advances theoretical discussions on invisibility in labor markets, exploring how migrant laborers, despite playing an essential role in the global economy, are systematically excluded from visibility, rights, and protections, thus reinforcing social and economic inequalities.