Garantías

The cruise ship industry straddles the sectors of shipping and tourism. The majority of a cruise ship’s crew are involved in service positions (i.e. office, entertainment, food and beverage, hotel, retail, IT, personal care) rather than in marine positions (i.e. deck and engine). In a legal sense, workers on-board a cruise ship are called ‘seafarers’ by virtue of their being on a ship (MLC 2006), but for most of them the job is largely about hospitality and tourism. They have much more in common with workers in airlines, cafes, pubs, holiday parks, and tourist companies (Nickson 2007) than with traditional seafarers on merchant vessels.

23 _{Most of the studies presented in this section are studies of ‘service workers’ or the hotel staff on-board} cruise ships. The present study contributes to this literature by including both hotel staff and marine crew as participants (see Table 15 in p.96)

Weaver (2005a) has observed that service work on-board cruise ships is commonly conceptualised as performative and interactive, where employees are expected to follow ‘routinized and standardized social encounters that involve compliance with prepared scripts’ (p.10). Frontline service workers within the ship’s hotel department are managed by the hotel director and the cruise director (see Appendix 2, p.254). As service workers, they are expected to be patient and friendly towards all passengers, especially those who may be more demanding. Tracy (2000) suggests that cruise ship workers become the ‘characters of commerce’ because of the inescapable emotional labour required of them (Hochschild 1983). Expected to provide a pleasant vacation experience to passengers, ‘employees engage in self-surveillance and subordinate themselves on behalf of management goals even when management is not looking’ (p.109). Johansson and Näslund (2009) reiterated the same point when they explained that service workers aboard cruise ships hide their own emotions of anger, fatigue and irritation from the view of the passengers who expect the ship to be a ‘paradise-like’ place of fun and relaxation. For the workers, only positive emotions (happiness and friendliness) are to be shown in public whereas negative emotions (loneliness, anxiety) should only be dealt with in private. Such performative service work is intimately tied to a toilsome workload. Zhao (2002) describes the seafarers’ physical labour and emotional labour in the following account:

They are in darkness about seafarers’ hard labour... Behind the scene and below the deck, seafarers … keep the cabin spotless, the glasses sparkling, the swimming pools glittering etc… However, once in the scene and on the deck, seafarers, no matter how they really feel, are obliged to control or manage their emotion so that they can combine the product of their physical labour with the product of their emotional labour. They, therefore, appear smiling. (p.8)

Cruise ship employees from the Philippines are illustrative of workers who seem to have internalised these modes of labouring. Terry (2013) notes that Filipino seafarers have become popular and populous on cruise ships because the Philippine state, the crewing agencies and the workers themselves have been effective in discursively constructing a particular image (see Section 2.3, pp.34-51) of service-oriented workers.

Filipino seafarers have a perceived reputation of being ‘hard working’ and ‘flexible’, ‘subservient’, ‘family-oriented’, ‘happy and nice’.

The intersection of nationality and job positions aboard cruise ships reflects social hierarchy and disparities in power relationships (Weaver 2005a). The middle and bottom of the workplace hierarchy is mostly occupied by workers from developing countries such as the Philippines. This raises the issue of managing a culturally diverse workplace and whether there is a ‘fit’ (Testa et al. 2003; Milde 2009) between the workers’ cultural values and beliefs (national culture) and a ship’s management practices, policies and values (organisational culture). In a series of studies, Testa and his colleagues (Testa et al. 1998; 2003; Testa 2004; 2007; Testa and Mueller 2009) showed that the background national culture of cruise employees’ is an important predictor of job satisfaction. Using Hofstede’s (Hofstede et al. 2010) framework, they consistently found that workers who came from countries with collectivist and high power-distance cultures reported higher levels of job satisfaction (Testa et al. 2003; Testa and Mueller 2009). In collectivist cultures, there is a strong emphasis on the influence of in-groups such as families and communities. Countries where an unequal distribution of power in the society is generally expected and accepted, are described as high power distance cultures. In their framework, countries with collectivist and high power distance cultures are grouped as ‘traditional’ whereas countries with individualist and low power distance cultures are grouped as ‘egalitarian’. Philippines, China, Singapore, and Croatia are examples of ‘traditional’ countries. Examples of ‘egalitarian’ countries include Germany, Italy, the UK and the USA. The researchers reasoned that:

service workers who happen to be members of the lower class from the less-developed traditional societies would be more comfortable in lower level service jobs than their counterparts from the developed, egalitarian “modern” societies where giving service (as a vocation) might be viewed as demeaning or subservient. (Testa and Mueller 2009 p.200)

This argument seems to support the ethno-social hierarchy of occupational positions on-board cruise ships which stereotypically assigns seafarers from developing/traditional societies such as the Philippines to subordinate service

positions. However, one major criticism is that the measure of national culture constructs, such as those proposed by Hofstede, are only relevant when used in tandem with national level variables (e.g. Are egalitarian countries more likely to have higher average household income and higher educational attainment than traditional countries?). These national culture constructs are inaccurate when projected onto individual and organisational level data (Venaik and Brewer 2010; 2013; Brewer and Venaik 2012) (Does work satisfaction of employees in Cruise Line A vary according to type of national culture?) because the units of analysis are mixed up. Moreover, there is a tendency to use these constructs to further reinforce the level of inequality and associated exploitation in the cruise ship industry (e.g. Testa and Mueller 2009).