Across the Chain: Labour and Logistics in the European Maritime Logistics Sector

This chapter presents an overview of working conditions and conflicts along the logistics chain. To achieve this aim, the structure of the supply chain is illustrated and integrated with additional items. The premise of this approach relies on the purpose of investigating working conditions and struggles through the observation of both the variety of labor regimes in the maritime-logistics chain and the overall frame within which labor is embedded. The perspective of this analysis allows us to grasp the common trends, taking into account the management of the chain, global factors, and power relationships, with a focus on dock labor in the European port sector and the container shipping industry. Part of the information in this chapter has been collected through a detailed review of specialized newsletters, and from ongoing comparative research into dock labor issues in the European ports. The structure of the chapter is as follows. After an overview of the working conditions and the conflicts across the maritime logistics chain in the last years, in the second part hypotheses are formulated. The structure of the supply chain from which the hypotheses derive is illustrated. The third part discusses the relationship between global factors and logistics labor, linking some trends that cross each leg of the chain, and focusing on the port sector. The conclusions provide a summary of the conceptual operations together with the partial confirmation of the hypotheses. This approach offers the possibility of verifying the following claims. Given the structural and institutional constraints partly common to the cases, partly specific to each of them, labor in the logistics chain remains a significant variable in value production. Nevertheless, there is a general trend towards the growth of contingent labor. The slow erosion of the institutional basis suggests an ongoing transition dictated by external pressures.