The Lived Lives of the Global Supply Chain: Commodity Circulation, Transnational Migration, and Digitality Across Asia

Taiwanese and Singaporean ports are paradigmatic sites to observe the new shapes of our globalised economic system, where commodities circulate through multiple circuits on transnational routes.  If global corporations are mostly pictured as the major actors of the global supply chain, who are the workers who daily contribute to its functioning? This paper looks at the invisible actors who daily contribute to its functioning: migrant maritime workers, by large employed and exploited in the shipping sector. This paper examines the experiences of migration, work and inequality of Southeast Asian migrant workers in the global shipping sector. Drawing on ethnographic work in the Taiwanese ports of Kaohsiung, Bali, and Kinmen, and on container ships circulating between China, Taiwan and Singapore, including biographical interviews with 60 Indonesian, Filipino and Vietnamese migrant seafarers, it looks at the social, economic, logistic, and digital resources migrant seafarers mobilize to cope with inequality. It shows how, in order to achieve upward social mobility, migrants get ‘connected’. While working for the formal institutions of the global supply chain, using online applications, and cooperating with multiple formal and informal actors, on material and digitized economic circuits, they trade ‘small commodities’ and produce novel transnational and digital economies. Through a focus on the invisible workers of the global supply chain and their daily experiences of global work, and informal commerce, this paper sheds new light on the diversity of global economies and supply chains, and on the role of digital migrant connectivity in shaping global trade and globalization.