%0 Journal Article
%T Utility Manning: Young Filipino Men, Servitude and the Moral Economy of Becoming a Seafarer and Attaining Adulthood
%A Roderick G Galam
%J Work, Employment and Society
%@ 1469-8722
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/0950017018760182
%X To get a job as a seafarer in the global maritime industry, thousands of male Filipino youths work for free as ¡®utility men¡¯ for manning agencies that supply seafarers to ship operators around the world. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and approached from a moral economy perspective, this article examines how manning agencies and utility men differentially rationalize this exploitative work (utility manning). Manning agencies use it as a technology of servitude that, through physical and verbal abuse and other techniques, enforces docility to prepare utility men for the harsher conditions on-board a ship. In contrast, utility men use it as a technology of imagination, gleaning from it a capacity to shape their future. Faced with few social possibilities in the Philippines, they deploy servitude as a strategy for attaining economic mobility and male adulthood
%K adulthood
%K imagination
%K moral economy
%K seafaring
%K servitude
%K utility manning
%K waithood
%K youth unemployment
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0950017018760182