The gray zones of the fish supply chain: Asian migrant workers, globalized labor regimes and precarity

• In Event: 40860 - Section on Economic Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 2. Reconfiguring Work

Abstract

This paper examines the globalized labor regime of the fish supply chain through the lived experiences of Southeast Asian migrant workers employed on foreign-flagged fishing vessels. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Taiwan, Singapore, and Indonesia, it highlights how this labor regime is embedded within overlapping and interconnected gray zones of work and regulation, as conceptualized by Kimberly Hoang’s (2022) framework of spiderweb capitalism. These gray zones—blurring the boundaries between formal and informal practices—facilitate exploitative labor conditions, including racialized hierarchies, restricted mobility, and socio-economic inequalities. Employers, brokers, and manning agents strategically navigate these ambiguities, manipulating deregulated labor markets to maximize profit and control. Simultaneously, migrant workers also engage with these gray zones to enhance their agency, accessing limited opportunities for socio-economic mobility despite significant constraints. This dual dynamic demonstrates how the fish supply chain’s labor regime is shaped by and reinforces the fragmented yet interconnected circuits of global supply chain capitalism. The paper situates these findings within broader scholarship on globalized labor and migration regimes, building on studies of precarious labor in Asia, and the political economy of global supply chains. Taking insights from Hoang’s conceptualization of spiderweb capitalism, it argues that the global fish supply chain operates through a complex web of informal practices and legal loopholes, producing both precarity and opportunity for workers. This paper highlights how migrant workers’ experiences illuminate the entanglements of exploitation, deregulation, and agency in global labor regimes, contributing to debates on the intersections of capitalism, migration, and inequality. It stresses on the ways in which these regimes blur boundaries between legality and illegality, formality and informality, producing precarious yet dynamic spaces of laboring in contemporary capitalism.
Keywords: globalized labor regime, fish supply chain, supply chain capitalism, gray zones, migrant labor, racialized labor, precarity, Asia

Author

• Beatrice Zani, National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)