Disarticulating distribution: Labor segmentation and subcontracting in global logistics

Abstract

a b s t r a c tAn enduring focus of scholarly work on global production networks (GPNs) is the process of insertion into production networks and the capacity of places to shape their manner of inclusion. Sometimes overlooked are ways in which these insertions are based on an evolving set of exclusions. A disarticulations perspective trains our attention on the mutual interplay between moments of inclusion and exclusion that produce uneven geographies and histories of development, foregrounding place-specific factors and offering a framework for understanding local experimentation. Firms continue to restructure under relentless pressure to improve performance and the concomitant need to experiment, causing firm strategy to shape-shift and re-making relations of inclusion and exclusion. In the distribution function of global supply chains, the prevailing value-creation strategy is downward pressure on the cost of labor, but this perhaps suggests a false sense of stability. Using data gathered in the distribution hub just outside of Chicago, I examine the role of labor market intermediaries in re-negotiating the boundaries of inclusion. This article explores processes of linking and delinking subsets of workers and the differential implications for worker segments and their attachment to the supply chain. Inscribed in the absorption of places and workers into GPNs are ongoing processes of disarticulation, evident in this case through the labor market strategies pursued by local firms and temporary staffing agencies. These processes lay bare the mechanisms that reproduce capital-labor relationships in global supply chains.

Holding together logistical worlds: Friction, seams and circulation in the emerging ‘global warehouse’

“…Second, therefore, attempts to control and exploit logistical labour have moved beyond the archetypal struggles of port stevedores that have provided much of the political impetus for research on critical logistics (Cowen, 2007;Neilson 2013, p 106). Rather, these struggles are being enacted additionally beyond the port, in less visible and less celebrated spaces such as DCs and truck parks (Bonacich & de Lara 2009;Yu & Egbelu, 2008;Cidell, 2015;Gutelius, 2015 (Paché, 2007). In Section 4 we show how these planned interruptions relate to logistical space as code-space, by focusing on an example of the data information systems that coordinate freight cargo flows.…”

New Geographies of Uneven Development in Global Formation: Thinking with Chase-Dunn

“…In the case of integrated warehousing and distribution centers in the U.S., for example, firms secure their position through subcontracting chains that facilitate an accordion-like proliferation of categories of temporary work, tiered by length of employment contract (from months to weeks to single shifts). In this industry, workers are made precarious by their gendered and racialized social location, reinforced by the criminal justice system (Gutelius 2015). Following Chase-Dunn, scholars must consider the implications for class politics of this kind of fragmentation of paid labor that mobilizes broader mixes of commodified labor along the spectrum in the different zones of the global hierarchy, and what this signals for the sorts of interactions that are taking placing between core and periphery regions.…”

Logistics at Work: Trucks, Containers and the Friction of Circulation in the UK

“…The location of this work within the more general category of contingency associated with the logistics precariat is therefore clear. It also has considerable affinities with Gutelius's (2015) research on DCs in the USA, where contingency grounded in worker hierarchies, sub-contracting, the widespread use of temporary agencies and wages below a legal minimum all point to the prevalence of the 'low road' model in logistics. Less obvious from the data extract is how contingency in the owner-driver sector of containerised haulage is also an effect of intra-firm dynamics, of the amount of work available and of the 24/7 delivery slots contracted to logistics purchasers by logistics suppliers.…”

“…However, Bonacich and Wilson's pioneering (2008) text, Getting the Goods, remains the only synthetic treatment of labour in the logistics revolution. Focusing once more on the USA, and particularly the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, and looking across maritime, port and landside (rail, road, warehousing and distribution centre (DC)) work, Bonacich and Wilson highlight the contingent character of much logistics work consequent upon widespread deregulation, particularly in seafaring, trucking and warehousing (see also Gutelius 2015). They show the increasing racialisation of the work and link contingency to weakened unions and declining wages and working conditions.…”