Volume 16, Issue 1 - Editors’ Forum: Workers’ Movements and the Global Supply Chain; Guest-editors: Robert Ovetz and Jake Alimahomed-Wilson

The global supply chain crisis during the pandemic provides an opportunity to reflect on the vulnerabilities of the just-in-time model of capitalist production. As capital studies and prepares for risks to the global supply chain, so must workers if we are make global systemic changes needed to reverse the many catastrophic crises facing humanity. The articles in this forum re-examine unions and global workers organizing in seven countries to move us past the limited focus on collective bargaining, contracts, labor law, and unions tied to neoliberal political parties to identify and assess strategies for cross-border worker organizing at these choke points to apply pressure, extract gains, and tip the balance of power in their favor.

Global trade is often understood by trade union officials to be an abstract policy-level issue without a direct role for workers or shop floor influence. As the UK establishes an independent trade policy in the wake of Brexit, this article explores the concept of strategic supply chain organizing as the basis for a shop steward-led strategy to counter the industrial impact of trade. Based on interviews with Unite shop stewards and work with the union’s Research Department, this article explores efforts within Unite the Union, the largest private and public sector trade union in the UK and Ireland, to advance such a strategy through the union’s activist shop stewards and democratic structures. While considering the limitations of existing union approaches to trade issues as well as the challenges of developing such a strategy within the context of a large multisector trade union, the article puts forward a methodology of applied industrial research rooted in the principles of workers’ inquiry and supply chain solidarity. Taken together, the article considers the potential for new collaboration between the union’s shop stewards within supply chains to more fully realize their latent collective industrial power.

Automation represents a sensitive issue in the debate between social actors of the port-maritime industry. Automation produced a contraction of the number of dockworkers since the 1960s. However, the idea that technological innovation will produce the disappearance of work is not sustained by empirical evidence. For this reason, trade unions have been particularly watchful. Despite the discourses about robotization carried out by supply chain operators, the paradigm of the post-COVID logistics chain is still based upon the human labor cost. During the pandemic there has been a transformation in working conditions not in terms of replacing people with robots, but rather of the robotization of workers to obtain the maximum productive exploitation at the minimum wage allowed. The purpose of this article is to provide an analysis of labor relations and workers organizing in light of the automation processes in the European port of Antwerp. The article focuses on how working conditions and jobs are potentially impacted by automation in ports, and on how workers disruptive strategies are resisting to these dynamics. The following questions have been answered: How do trade unions and dockworkers respond to automation? What are the strategies implemented in the bargaining processes?

Amazon is facing growing scrutiny over its workplace, community, and environmental harms, but interventions remain fragmented: grassroots organizing efforts against productivity quotas and diesel emissions have yet to be incorporated into policy debates over whether Amazon should be broken up or operated under direct public provision. Meanwhile, the company continues to define how people buy, sell, invest, and work, positioning itself to control global supply chains. This article challenges the perceived inevitability of Amazon’s growth. Linking questions of harm mitigation and economic governance, it shows how the various struggles being waged against Amazon point to an emergent counterhegemonic vision for Amazon, one marked by worker power, surveillance abolition, and ecological degrowth. This approach nests contingent organizing opportunities within a comprehensive vision of social transformation, assimilating seemingly conflicting reform paths. Rather than counterposing antitrust and nationalization, the article treats these as levers along a continuum of degrowing Amazon and realigning its operative principles around social need.

The logistics sector in France is emblematic of contemporary labor processes in the service sector, where working conditions are at the root of a long-term, but silent, health crisis. Although the unionization of French logistics workers has gained some strength since the early 2000s, struggles over wages and working conditions remained segmented and local, and were unable to contain the progressive casualization of the employment or to counter the intensification of work. This article is a reflection on the fragmented and low-intensity conflictuality of the French logistics sector. Drawing on three ethnographic studies and on quantitative data, we analyze labor conflicts in various segments of the warehouse industry during the last decade in France, and identify some of the limits of French trade union strategies toward organizing logistics workers. We show that the massive use of temporary work and the weakness of the efforts made by traditional trade unions federations prevent the emergence of a larger labor movement in the sector. We argue that the fragmentation and the very high turnover that characterizes the French warehouse industry should encourage trade unions to invest more resources, often local and rooted in logistics zones, from outside the workplace.

This article focuses on the Supply Chain Law Initiative in Germany (SCLI)/Initiative Lieferkettengesetz as a case of global justice advocacy. The SCLI was a campaign by German civil society organizations that advocated for a law that would make it mandatory for corporations active in Germany to respect human, labor, and environmental rights along their supply chains. This research explores the strategies for advocacy used by the SCLI in the process of effective law-making. It also investigates the role of the SCLI in the context of global labor solidarity. The research results show that although this new law has some shortcomings in terms of international human rights standards, it has achieved partial progress as one of the most successful examples of alliance building between unions and civil society organizations in Germany. The SCLI has brought about a paradigm shift from voluntary towards mandatory due diligence. This experience can be carried one step further to accomplish a supply chain law at the European Union level. The authors argue that the SCLI experience opens up a new stage for rethinking the structural dilemma of unions in Germany in choosing between global solidarity and national corporatist social partnership.

The following is an account of my own personal involvement, over the last 20 years, with a circle of militants in California’s San Francisco Bay Area who have been researching changes in the class composition of global production. We have been using informal and formal inquiries with rank-and-file workers to analyze how transformations in communication, data gathering, and transportation technologies have revolutionized the logistics industry. Our goal has been finding supply chain vulnerabilities, where working class solidarity has the greatest possibility to spread up and down these value chains, and for class struggle to be effectively cross-sectoral and international. The following is a balance sheet of our efforts, demonstrating the instances when we were able to realize our goals, as well as critiquing our limitations. We hope this will point to the importance of workers’ inquiries in the current era, especially in adjusting to the many changes the COVID-19 pandemic has wrought, exposing the weaknesses of just-in-time production chains spanning the planet, changes to class composition, and encouraging new forms of class struggle along ever-changing value chains.