The nature of capital presupposes that it travels through the different phases of circulation not as it does in the mind, where one concept turns into the next at the speed of thought, in no time, but rather as situations which are separate in time. It must spend some time as a chrysalis before it can take off as a butterfly [i].
Before flying like a butterfly, contemporary financialized capital still needs to pass though its chrysalis phase. This peculiar stage is the contemporary domain of logistics, whose vast ocean of operations[ii] has a worldwide extension and unprecedented speed. Logistics is the strategic intelligence that coordinates the harmonizing of production, circulation and consumption of global capitalism, where an increasingly accelerated high-speed circulation is gaining hegemony over the whole process. The geographical fantasy of logistics conceives the world as a system of continuous flows which are always in motion: a cartography of fluxes conducted through a complex network of logistical infrastructures. The conjunction of flows of money with flows of labour produces in this sense a variegated and uneven geography of commodity circulation sailing over the whole surface of the Earth. These currents are commanded by logistical inputs, canalising them within channels and corridors and managing their frequencies: “Logistics turns solids into liquids — or at its extreme, into electrical fields — taking the movement of discrete elements and treating them as if they were oil in a pipeline, flowing continuously at precisely adjustable pressures”, writes Jasper Bernes,[iii] recalling Fernand Braudel [iv]. Logistics therefore expresses a specific power of flow coordination, choreographing the commodity circus.
However, apart from logistics’ own imaginary, it is necessary to criticize the liquid and smooth metaphors of logistics’ jargon. If logistics dictates the rhythm of contemporary capitalism, its movements are also always volatile and contested. Moreover, the more the logistics “orchestra” accelerates its flows of commodities, the greater the power of interruptions to those flows. In this chapter, then, we present a dissonant arrangement of the usual logistics concerto that has been playing in Northern Italy throughout the last decade, the dissonance caused by a process of struggles and grassroots organizing within its logistics industry. This European area has been configured as a strategic place for commodity circulation, an extended hub, an operational landscape where many firms handling the administration of commodity distribution have found their headquarters. However, the scene we will describe is quite a contradictory one, confirming Beverly Silver’s paradox that the bargaining power of the employed increases where the labour market bargaining power of workers declines[v].
In recent years, the Italian labour market has been particularly affected by a series of processes that have profoundly weakened labour power: the casualization of the workforce and the erosion of the welfare state, the long-term effects of the global economic crisis which began in 2007-2008, the delocalisation of production activities and the weakening of collective bargaining. Within this context, the logistics industry seemed to be the most advanced point of this tendency, given the wide recourse to subcontracting, the spreading of illegal practices and the employment of a hardly blackmailed recently-arrived migrant workers. However, even if on one hand this scenario seems to confirm that the “logistics revolution” is one of the key tools in the long global offensive against labour, on the other hand it is precisely along logistics’ organizational structures that the system of coordination, communication and transport has opened capital up to the danger of disruption in this area. This is thanks to a new process of worker organization, representing the current peak in Italian workers’ struggles. The confluence of these two processes (one of sectors with the most precarious and difficult labour conditions with most powerful contemporary example of labour organization) makes contemporary Northern Italy’s logistics space a “frontier zone” suspended in an uncertain equilibrium.
The chapter is organized in four parts. First of all we discuss the territorial context of these logistics struggles. Secondly, we present a concise chronology of the most relevant moments of conflict and the trajectory of the workers’ organizing. Thirdly, we offer a description of the labour force within the logistics sector and the processes of unionisation and explain the strategies that logistics employers are adopting to respond to workers’ organizing; we also trace some hypotheses around the tendencies of this conflict. We conclude with some more general political reflections about the potentials and limits of these logistics struggles.
To grasp the conditions of possibility for the emergence of these logistics struggles in Northern Italy it is necessary to contextualize them within the specificities of this territory. Usually, talking about logistics necessitates a focus on specific places, generally ports, single logistics warehouses or at least the so-called ‘logistics cities’, indicating a sort of bounded space, generally conceived as an ex novo urban park, an area where logistics activities are concentrated. Alongside this conception there is a tendency to conceptualize the nexus between territory and logistics as something quite new, and logistical spaces are framed as the fresh production of a series of “exceptions” in the urban tissue. However, Italian logistics struggles allow us to reverse this perspective. The map of the strikes and their interconnections show a “logistical fabric” that leads us to re-conceptualize logistics as an organizing principle of contemporary urban territories, making them locations or terminals of logistics activities. Boris Vormann states that “Just-in-time production has recreated the city in its image [and as commodities] are shipped from their point of production to the point of sale, they pass through and depend on the urban hubs and bottlenecks of international trade, in turn reshaping the physical layout and the multiscalar governance logics of global cities”[vi]. In this way the whole contemporary city is becoming a hub and there is at play a ‘logisticalization’ of the urban fabric that has completely subverted the established Italian landscape[vii]. It is not a coincidence that one of the main Italian newspapers has referred to Northern Italy as the “logistics valley”. Here, logistics assembles different businesses, labour forces, software systems, and cultural contexts to produce a governance regime, understood as a set of practices of knowledge and power that constitute a space “above, beyond, between and across states”[viii].
Italian logistics struggles have been concentrated within the North of the country, within a huge valley traversed by the river Po. The Po valley region[ix] is enclosed by a mountain range to the North (the Alps) and to the South (the Apennines), while it is bounded by two different seas: to the West, the Tyrrhenian Sea, and to the East, the Adriatic Sea. The Po Valley region is of geostrategic importance for Europe in the global economy. It is the principal junction that connects the Mediterranean Sea with the Continent and vice versa thanks to a series of tunnels in the Alps and many ports on the two shores (for example Genoa, Ravenna, Venice, Trieste). However, what makes this area a crucial node for the articulation and grounding of global flows and a platform for “global connections”, is above all its “internal” urban configuration. Following Jean Gottman, we maintain that Northern Italy can be configured as a megalopolis, with a complex logistical matrix of centers and peripheries, intermodal transport terminals, warehouses, IT infrastructure, container parks and shipping ports, interspersed with suburbs, green belts, roads, railways, water systems and barren land[x]. Milan is the epicentre of this megalopolis, but “more distant cities from Milan can also act as centers of value for leading LSPs [Logistics Service Provider], such as the national crossroad of Bologna”[xi]. Italy is inserted in the global logistics network primarily through the presence of large foreign global operators, but at the same time it remains an economy that acts mainly on a national scale, and even in some cases a local one[xii]. Given this context, in recent years we are witnessing a multiplication of operational sites (warehouses), even if the management functions are concentrated in few places. “Value, information and power are on one side concentrated but, on the other side, are also very selectively distributed to certain places in the national space, depending on their sectorial and geographical specificities”[xiii]. It is precisely this continuum of concentrated and extended logistical textures and nodes that constitutes this Italian megalopolis as a logistics land bridge where commodities are mostly moved via road transportation.
The construction/evolution of this enlarged European ‘choke point’ was made possible due to an interlacing of private investments and public interventions. The iconic emblem of the region is the model of the Interporto, a major intermodal transportation and logistics hub constructed since the 1970s close to almost every major city, thanks to public-private partnerships. The Interporto is one of the first cases of political logistics planning in Europe, and it is linked to the crisis of the Fordist model and to the cities’ necessity to escape the increasing gridlocks. However, the realization of this logistical territory in Northern Italy has been also accomplished thanks to a neoliberal logic of urbanization, making possible the proliferation of warehouse construction without any public oversight. This dynamic has enlarged a widespread metropolis. Most of the logistics workers perceive this territorial particularity. A Senegalese warehouse worker who has lived in Italy almost twenty years and worked in six different cities, ironically described the Italian landscape as flat and monotonous: “Everything is a warehouse, and a small town near to a warehouse”. In the words of Karim, a Moroccan of the union SI Cobas: “I arrived in Italy in 2009, and I didn’t know anything. For years I didn’t realize where the city centre was”[xiv].
Eleonora, an Italian activist, puts it this way:
“The chronicles of these struggles refer to very different cities like Piacenza, Bologna, Milano… but still their scenography never changes. We are talking about industrial peripheries far from the city centre, where a sequence of identical gigantic warehouses are connected by huge streets, where a non-stop queue of trucks passes through, slowed down by the waiting of loading and unloading of commodities. When you reach a picket line, you can perceive the difference between a city and another only from the trip you do and its duration. […] Bologna’s Interporto is many kilometers from the city centre, and it is surrounded by many warehouses and small towns, where thousands of logistics workers live. They come from really far: Morocco, Tunisia, Somalia, Eritrea, Senegal, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Romania, Albania… Once settled down in this region, they rarely go to the city […]. Hence, the logistics workers are a sort of army of the underground ready to be enlisted by capital, every day and every night, being completely disconnected from the rest of the social context. Through the struggle they have somehow emerged from the darkness”[xv].
According to Saskia Sassen, “the localization of the global creates a set of objective conditions of engagement”, empowering the “disadvantaged” to gain presence[xvi]. These logistics struggles validate this thesis, as nowadays warehouses and logistical hubs in Northern Italy are not only places of commodity storage and transportation but also sites of conflictual organization, showing that under certain conditions, logistics routes (usually pathways of capitalist accumulation), can become paths of training for new worker subjectivities.
The prelude of this phenomena can be traced to 2008-2009 in Northern Lombardy (the Milan region), when the first contact between rank-and-file unionists and some workers occurred in the food retail sector. These first strikes obtained some significant results, planting the seeds for successive steps. However, it is only from 2011-2012 that the Italian logistics struggles experienced a decisive crescendo. In 2011 there were two main labour disputes in the Milan hinterland. Again, the warehouses of two Italian supermarket chains (Il Gigante and Esselunga) were the target of the struggles, but in these cases there was a strong intervention by the police to break the picket lines and end the strike. Nevertheless, the clashes between workers and police were very visible in the media, helping the spread of this fairly new form of unionism. Rather then simply declaring the strike and abstaining from the work place, the workers here directly blocked their warehouses, inflicting important economic losses on their employers. From July 2011 to 2012 the new epicentre of these struggles became the logistics pole of Piacenza, 70km south of Milan. This time the strikes erupted against two multinational parcel delivery firms (TNT and GLS) and in the logistics warehouse of Ikea, one of the world’s largest furniture retailers. In a few months hundreds of workers joined the rank-and-file union SI Cobas, thanks to the informal networks within migrant communities, the support of local social activists, and a feeling of optimism and militancy linked to the ongoing Arab insurrections. In fact, many workers of TNT were Egyptian, and during the pickets they were heard to sing: “Here is our Tahrir Square!”.
These struggles lasted for months, and were frequently attacked by the police with tear gas and framed in a denigratory way by the media. However, they again obtained significant improvements in working conditions and the workers felt a new sensation of being “present” within a context where they have always been seen as strangers. They started to label this feeling as “dignity”. In the last months of 2012 the echo of these struggles travelled very far thanks to the mainstream media, the use of social networks by the workers and the spreading of information between migrants communities and social activists. During the winter of that year many other logistics companies (including Artoni, Bartolini and DHL) registered a process of unionisation with the Cobas all around the Po valley, especially in the East. One of the most important tools of the union is the solidarity between different warehouses. When there is an important strike in one company, many workers from other companies directly support it.
On March 22, 2013, the unions announced the first 24-hour general strike of the logistics sector. All around Italy the warehouses of multinational express delivery companies and other logistics operators were shut down, as trucks were blocked from getting in. A banner read, in Italian, English, and Arabic: “Strike and fight for dignity, until victory”. The slogans recalled the Industrial Workers of the World in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century: “An injury to one is an injury to all”. A few months later one of the well-known logistics struggles began against Granarolo, a multinational dairy corporation. Given the many delays in morning deliveries of milk to coffee bars, the media named it the “Cappuccino Strike”. Lasting for over a year, it was a deeply political battle with several police interventions to force out the pickets and many arrests, demonstrations of thousands of workers, solidarity action to boycott the firm. Even if almost every institution explicitly acted against the workers, the output of the struggle was quite successful, giving a great visibility and a forward momentum to the logistics workers movement. During 2014 the process of unionization arrived in the West, especially in the food retail industry in Turin, and many other companies were afflicted by strikes during the subsequent years.
Mapping the strikes gives an idea of how logistics is a really heterogeneous world. However, between big multinational companies and small local enterprises, the one main common point is the very hard working conditions, primarily linked to the widespread subcontracting process to cooperatives and their intense use of migrant labour. Italian cooperatives, which were founded in the middle of the nineteenth century as an instrument of workers’ self-defense, employ migrants as “working members”. The expansion of the cooperative movement during recent decades (linked to increasing outsourcing practices, tax breaks, and to the growing pressure on prices in the market) has brought a new business-style approach. Today, in most of the new cooperatives internal democracy and working conditions have deteriorated[xvii]. Officially, “working members” have permanent contracts, but their concrete employment situation is highly insecure. As the re-hiring of workers is not assured, principal contractors can use the threat of ending the relationship with the cooperative as a way of discouraging industrial action.
For nearly 10 years, struggles have achieved many concrete objectives in terms of working conditions, wages, and of workers improving their dignity and power in the workplaces. A crucial turning point in this sense is the agreement stipulated in November 2016 between the Cobas and some of the major express delivery companies. The agreement replaces the previous ones, and improves in many ways the agreement with the main national trade union confederations. In particular, it introduces the so-called “social clause”, which constrains principal contractors to re-hire all the workers in case of a subcontractor change. However, the application of this agreement is not homogeneous, as it depends on the strength of the union and the specific situation in each workplace. To give one example, in March 2017 a protest of workers employed by a haulage cooperative stopped the production of Coca Cola in Nogara (Verona). The cooperative that won the new contract refused to re-hire all the employees who were all members of a rank-and file union (ADL-Cobas). The situation was so critical that US Embassy in Italy asked the Italian government to solve the conflict. In this case, the protest ended with the hiring of less than 10 workers, while the other 35 workers were fired and received an amount of about 30,000 euro (based on seniority) as compensation.
Alongside the intensification of the economic crisis and labour market transformations (namely, the casualization of labour and the weakening of collective bargaining), in Italy the composition of the workforce has also changed immensely, and migrants have become a crucial part of economic processes. In 2014, they made up 10.3% of all employees[xviii]. The logistics sector in Northern Italy is one of the most affected by this process, as here migrants represent almost the 80% of the workforce in many warehouses.
While traditional unions generally tend to consider migrants as “birds of passage”[xix] available to work for lower wages and worse working conditions, the long cycle of struggles that has disrupted the Italian logistics sector for almost 10 years would not have been possible without their strong commitment and determination. Indeed, despite the economic crisis, migrant workers do not easily interrupt their migration project, for which they have already endured a difficult process of uprooting, and conversely put in place different strategies of resistance not only for their immediate survival, but also for their long-term ambitions[xx]. In this context, Italian grassroots unions – less bureaucratic and hierarchical than traditional ones – give considerable flexibility to the agency of migrant workers. They have been free to choose their own types of action and their representatives among members of their communities, hence decreasing the distance that can exist between migrant workers and Italian semi-professional shop stewards (especially in terms of language and culture). In this way, community networks that help newcomers to settle in the host society (including for employment), and that are integrated in many workplaces[xxi], have been converted into a resource for the union. At the same time ethnic recruitment, built by the management to ensure control over labour through the enforcement of divisions and internal hierarchies, has been turned into a resource for collective organizing.
However, in recent years employers have also been putting in place a range of strategies in order to regain control over labour, and to compensate in terms of productivity what have been lost in terms of costs of labour. On one side, anti-union policies and repression are still used in many cases to discourage union organizing. Two particularly grave events marked the recent period. On the 14th of September, 2016, during a strike at GLS in Piacenza, the worker Abd el Saleem was killed by a truck who struck him. On the 27th of January, 2017, the national coordinator of the SI Cobas was arrested and held in custody for a few days, generating a strong reaction by the union militants with days of demonstrations, blockades and strikes.
During the last period, as a response to labour conflicts, companies are also enacting a general reorganisation and innovation in the sector.
Firstly, they are trying to attract a different composition of the labour force – who they consider potentially more docile – using a “narrative” that presents logistics as an opportunity, as a new “cool” and international workplace rather than a “migrant job” symbolically placed at the last link of the economic chain. Those who are targeted with this new rhetoric are mostly young Italians deeply impoverished by the economic crisis. This search for new labour pools and new combinations in the labour force emerged for the first time in August 2016, when a series of strikes at the logistics warehouses of H&M (a multinational clothing-retail company) brought to light a new social composition of the labour force. While most of the workers in the logistics struggles were previously migrants, here many young Italian workers were at the front of the picket line. Moreover, big companies like Amazon are starting to build up their own logistics structures, attracting a similar workforce, and, related to this, a new kind of logistics is starting to emerge in this area: a new metropolitan logistics based on the “just-in-time and to the point” logic, especially in online food delivery operated by corporations like Foodora and JustEat.
Secondly, mechanization, automation and the use of new technologies are implemented in order to increase control over labour and intensify the labour process. With regard to this question, it is important to underline that logistics faces a kind of “paradox”; while it tends toward standardization, and thus to the increasing use of technologies and machines, only living labour can provide the resilience and adaptability required by its processes[xxii]. However, in recent years many employers – mostly the big multinational delivery companies able to make large investments – started to increase the use of technologies and, alongside this, to change their attitude toward grassroots unionism. Then, rather than putting in place anti-union policies and taking on the risk of a labour conflict (and thus of serious economic losses), they are changing their strategy in order to increase productivity and regain control over labour through the co-optation/cooperation with the union. In this sense, the agreement signed in 2016 between Cobas and the major delivery companies can be understood as a first important step in this direction.
Finally, a new emerging trend can be observed which again concerns the use of subcontracting to the cooperative system. As the complex inter-firm networks and subcontracting chains that were used in the past to reduce costs become less profitable because labour costs have increased, many big companies are reconsidering the possibility of internalizing labour in order to retake control over the whole labour process.
As our contribution outlines, the logistical world in this contemporary Italian megalopolis is a field of tensions, and its development is at stake within the conflict between the forces and tendencies we tried to depict. Rather than a smooth space for commodities’ free movement, the potential threat of interruption to logistics circulation has been ongoing for many years. To produce this scenario, some crucial turning points have to be taken into consideration: 1) While the eruption of the global crisis in 2007-2008 has led to a reduction of labour power and to a deterioration of working conditions in many sectors, here the crisis has been in turn used by the workers. The refusal of the threat of the crisis as a way to lower wages and to erode labour rights has rather been a spring of subjectivation for the logistics workers; 2) As discussed before, struggles have been possible due to a counter-use of ethnic recruitment. The solidarity within migrant communities that connect labour within the region has been a crucial tool to sustain the strikes; 3) A series of “innovative” practices (or, in some cases, of old practices of the workers’ movement almost forgotten today) have been crucial to achieving results: the radicalism of the strikes, with blockades and pickets; the solidarity between different warehouses (workers of different companies going to support a strike in another workplace); and the involvement of many different actors (usually unrelated to capital/labour conflicts) within the struggles (like social centres, activist collectives, and students).
Many different labour disputes are currently ongoing, and the process of unionization is stabilizing or at least increasing. The current situation opens up a path for an institutionalization of the logistics unions, which could have very complex consequences. In fact, this poses a risk of co-optation within the emerging Italian logistics system, as well as the risk of a decrease in the long term of the power gained by the workers. Accordingly, we believe that at the moment there is at stake in these disputes a political element that goes beyond the field of labour disputes. For this reason we have focused in this chapter on the territorial dimension of these struggles to suggest that their force and relevance cannot be understood by looking only at the workplace level. In other words, the strength of the Italian logistics struggles and their ability to play a different melody in the logistics orchestra, has to be found in the connection between workplaces and their social and territorial context. They have expressed, at least partially and in some specific cases, a form of “social power”[xxiii]. This means that the logistics workers’ “associational power”[xxiv] within workplaces and their “positional power” (thanks to their strategic position within the cycle of production and distribution)[xxv] have been important, but they are not sufficient to explain such a prolonged and radical process of struggles and organization. Without the crucial connection to other subjectivities and struggles outside the workplaces, and without the counter-use of migration networks, it would be hard to imagine such a process. This means that workers’ power has been built within and outside workplaces at the same time.
To conclude, a more general problem still remains to be discussed. Logistics’ other paradox is that on one hand logistics companies tend to segment their labour force and their territorial locations as much as they can to improve their control over labour. On the other hand, logistical chains are constantly increasing the interdependence between every single link. Within this gap, between the tendency to produce heterogeneization of labour and territories and the necessity to improve the connection among workers and urban areas, probably lies a new global possibility for labour power. However, given the important diffusion within the Northern Italian megalopolis of logistics struggles, they have not realized a concrete connection with other national contexts. This is a political problem still to be solved.
[i] Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, London: Penguin, 1973, p. 274.
[ii] For a general introduction to the concept of “operation” and for a theoretical framework we refer to Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, ‘Extraction, Logistics, Finance. Global Crisis and the Politics of Operations’, Radical Philosophy, 178, 2013, pp. 8-18.
[iii]Jaspers Bernes, Logistics, counterlogistics and the communist prospect: https://libcom.org/library/logistics-counterlogistics-communist-prospect-jasper-bernes.
[iv]Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce, University of California Press, 1992, p. 22.
[v] Beverly J. Silver, ‘Theorising the working class in twenty-first-century global capitalism’, in Maurizio Atzeni (ed.), Workers and labour in a globalised capitalism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 46–69.
[vi]Boris Vormann, Infrastructural Statecraft and the Rise of Just-in-time Urbanism, 2017, https://globalurbanhistory.com/2017/01/09/infrastructural-statecraft-and-the-rise-of-just-in-time-urbanism/.
[vii] See Niccolò Cuppini, ‘Dissolving Bologna; Tensions between Citizenship and the Logistics City’, Citizenship Studies, 21, 4, 2017, pp. 495-507.
[viii]Wendy Larner and William Walters, Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces. London: Routledge 2004.
[ix] This geographical conceptualization is elaborated in Niccolò Cuppini, Mattia Frapporti, Maurilio Pirone, ‘Logistics Struggles in the Po Valley Region. Territorial Transformations and Processes of Antagonistic Subjectivation’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 114, 1, 2015, pp. 119-134.
[x]Recalling Ned Rossiter, Software, Infrastructure, Labor: A Media Theory of Logistical Nightmares, New York: Routledge, 2016, p. 35.
[xi] Sébastien Antoine, Cécile Sillig, Hilda Ghiara, ‘Advanced Logistics in Italy: A City Network Analysis’, Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie, 2016.
[xii] See Rossana Cillo and Lucia Pradella, ‘New immigrant struggles in Italy’s logistics industry’, Comparative European Politics, 2016, pp. 1-17.
[xiii] Sébastien Antoine, Cécile Sillig, Hilda Ghiara, Advanced Logistics in Italy: A City Network Analysis.
[xiv]Interview undertaken in Bologna at the Si Cobas headquarter, April the 28th, 2017.
[xv]Interview reported in Fulvio Massarelli, Scarichiamo i padroni, Milano: Agenzia X, 2014, p. 111.
[xvi] Saskia Sassen, ‘Repositioning of Citizenship: Emergent Subjects and Spaces for Politics’, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 46, 2002, p. 21.
[xvii] Devi Sacchetto and Marco Semenzin, ‘Workers’ cooperatives in Italy: between solidarity and autocratic centralism’, in P. Ngai, K. Hok Bun, Y. Hairong and A. Koo (eds.), Social Economy in China and the World, Abingdon, New York: Routledge, 2015, pp.135-155.
[xviii] Ruth Milkman, ‘Immigrant workers, precarious work, and the US labor movement’, Globalizations, 8, 3, 2011, pp. 361-372.
[xix] Michael J. Piore, Birds of passage: migrant labor and industrial societies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1979.
[xx] Devi Sacchetto and Francesca Alice Vianello, Navigando a Vista. Migranti nella crisi economica tra lavoro e disoccupazione, Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2014.
[xxi] Ruth Milkman, ‘Immigrant workers, precarious work, and the US labor movement’, Globalizations, 8, 3, 2011, pp. 361-372.
[xxii]Giorgio Grappi, Logistica, Roma: Ediesse, 2016.
[xxiii]Maurizio Ricciardi, ‘Appunti per una teoria politica delle migrazioni: potere sociale e politicizzazione della differenza’, in Sandro Chignola and Devi Sacchetto (eds.), Le reti del valore, Migrazioni, produzione e governo della crisi, Roma: Derive Approdi, 2017, pp. 108-124.
[xxiv]Erik Olin Wright, ‘Working-class power, capitalist-class interests, and class compromise’, American Journal of Sociology, 105, 4, 2000, pp. 957–1002.
[xxv]Edna Bonacich and Jake B. Wilson, Getting the goods: Ports, labor, and the logistics revolution, Cornell University Press, 2008.
This article has been published as capther of Jake Wilson and Immanuel Ness book Choke Points. Logistics Workers Disrupting the Global Supply Chain:
