The Cruise Industry

Many people get excited at the mention of a cruise ship vacation. Images of vast seas, tropical beaches, and never-ending supplies of food come to mind. Yet even on board, travelers might miss the often unfortunate reality of these party-vessels. These ships hold an extremely discriminatory and arbitrary working environment for the labor force below deck, much of which is imported. These foreign laborers come primarily from the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia, with Filipinos making up about 33% of the workforce on cruise ships. Laborers are treated unjustly according to American law, with many reporting “systemic wage theft and 80-hour workweeks with no days off for eight to ten months at a time. [Workers] also say they are pressured to

The industry does not technically belong to any one state, even though individual ships are registered under specific countries. According to Caitlin E. Burker, a professor at University of Florida, “many vessels within the same fleet are often registered to different countries. Carnival Corporation, for example, has flagged their cruise vessel Celebration under Panama and Destiny under the Bahamas,” (Burker 6). Because cruise companies are able to register their individual ships in many countries, as a company, they are not held liable under any one country. Therefore, the industry exists as a supernational organization, able to bypass the rules and regulations of any one nation. Sassen brings up the concept of powerful supernational organizations surpassing the power of the state, especially in terms of addressing the globalized market and the movement of persons (10). She uses this term to describe organizations such as the European Union, the United Nations, and NATO, which are all organizations created by the leaders of nations, and ultimately follow the moral values of these nations. The cruise ship industry is a supernational organization created by economic leaders rather than politicians. This creates an organization that is guided only by its economic agenda, therefore dismissing the rights of the individual. Organizations such as the European Union take

Interest groups are able to lobby for certain laws and often have the ability to buy the loyalty of political representatives. The cruise industry has a history of court cases that were ruled in its favor, and most of the cases and laws that the industry is involved in have encompassed limiting workers’ rights to sue against their US-based employees in American courts. Last year, the Cruise Lines International Association spent more that a million dollars lobbying in Congress. It pushed to pass a law that would prevent foreign cruise workers in U.S. waters “from protection under U.S. law.” Even “Carnival Corporation itself gave $900,000 in political contributions,” (Presser). In Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America, Daniel Tichenor argues that interest groups play a strong role in forming American policy, but it is important to acknowledge “the structural barriers and systematic exclusion of disadvantaged groups, especially nonwhite newcomers” (24). This is true in the case of the cruise ship industry because the cruise ship laborers have no say in the political sphere, while the industry does. This unequal representation allows the industry to support policies that lessen its own regulation, with no opposition from foreign workers. The cruise industry uses its economic influence to bypass any sort of power that the American government attempts to hold over its governing,