Shipping

Maya Jasanoff reviews Rose George’s Ninety Percent of Everything, a study of the gigantic and largely unnoticed shipping industry.

Shipping is one of the key factors in globalization, and today’s shipping is cheap and efficient as a result of “containerization”: “In the 1960s, the shipping industry was transformed by the widespread adoption of the standardized shipping container. Developed by American trucking entrepreneur Malcom McLean, the container served as a one-size-fits-all package for goods. These twenty-foot boxes could be packed at the place of consignment (whether a factory, a warehouse, or a person’s front door), hitched up to a truck, driven to the quayside, lifted off the truck by a crane, and loaded directly into their designated places in a ship’s hold—thus eliminating expensive, time-consuming transfers from land transport to port warehouse, warehouse to ship hold. If 13,000 containers seem like a lot to load onto a ship, consider what it was like when every single item within those containers would have to be loaded individually; inventories of even modest-sized ships in the pre-container age ran into the hundreds of thousands of items.”

It’s a shady business: “Shipping companies are among the most ‘defiantly opaque’ businesses in the world. They are masked by the system of flags of convenience, under which ships are registered in countries other than their owners’, allowing them to skirt fees, taxes, and labor regulations. Nominally, the world’s three biggest merchant fleets belong to Panama, Liberia, and the Marshall Islands, even though not one of those ships likely has a Panamanian, Liberian, or Marshall Islander associated with it. More than a hundred ships are registered in landlocked Mongolia and Moldova. A ship will often be owned in one country, managed from a second, and chartered to a third, in ‘a dizzying Russian doll of ownership.’”

This complexity leaves sailors vulnerable to abuse. Nonpayment of wages is common, and there’s little recourse: “If a citizen of the Philippines working on board a ship flagged to Liberia, owned by a Greek, and sailing in international waters gets assaulted by a Croatian shipmate, then where would he or she file suit? Out of cell-phone range and with little or no private Internet access while at sea, crew members have no recourse to external help if anything goes wrong. In practice, the high seas are a legal no-man’s-land, where the captain’s will is law.”