Dock labour regimes in the European port system: comparative case studies in container terminals of Genoa and Antwerp

In the last decades, the global dynamics of contemporary capitalism have revolutionized the structure of port labour. European ports, embedded in ever changing economic and logistics systems, were confronted with shifting port governance arrangements, and started to witness a substantial transition that speeded in late 1990s, when structural changes in the port environment occurred in terms of economic, logistics and institutional setting. Ports became a mere “pawn in the game of global corporate interests and intermodal networks” (Slack, 1993), an “element in the value-driven chain system (Robinson, 2002), increasingly conceived not as individual places that handle ships, but as turntables within global supply chains and global production networks” (ibidem). Referring to the radical change in the management of the whole supply chains, Bonacich and Wilson (2008) coined this shift in perspective as logistics revolution: “ideally, there should be no point, from production to final sale, when goods sit around waiting for further processing”. Circulation, in other words, has become a part of the production process itself (Chua, 2014). Competition shifted from the firm level to the supply chain level (Bonacich & Wilson, 2008). The above changes have influenced drastically the port environment and the competitive outlook for established load centres, reshaping port scenarios and enabling newcomers to enter the port scene. Meanwhile, the overall port labour has experienced a metamorphosys, in order to adapt to the new scenarios: the juridical, professional and societal status of dock labour changed as well. How exactly these phenomena have affected dock labour, is one of my concerns. Terminal containers, in particular, are a prism through which is possible to observe such dynamics, an appropriate empirical ground in which to test how the new paradigms of global circulation and production have influenced the organizational patterns of dock labour. It is thus relevant to analyse the interplay of the above phenomena in the European port environment by the viewpoint of dock labour, in light of the recent functional and spatial development of the European container port system via the forces of an ever-changing market environment (Notteboom, 2012). The key issues that often appear in labour reform processes relate to the classification of dock work, the legal status of the dockworker, the functioning of labour pools, the arrangements at the work floor and the qualification of dockworkers (Notteboom, 2010). The idea of my research is to analyse such factors, as well as the social processes triggered, by adding a more detailed perspective and applying it to the specific case study of dock labour regime in terminal containers of Genoa Psa Voltri Prà (Voltri Terminal Europe) and Antwerp in Belgium (Europa Terminal). Both terminals are managed by Psa International (Port of Singapore Authority), one of the world’s largest container terminal operator. Through a comparative analysis between the two case studies, it is possible to explain the implications of different dock labour regimes and organizational models, as well as the consequences of further sociologically relevant elements. The final aim of my research is to give an empirical contribution in this under-researched field of enquiry. Therefore, following the conceptual framework provided by Theo Notteboom, the research I am trying to develop wheel around the following questions: To what extent do the constraints of the global supply chain affect dock labour regime in the European ports? Why do such processes differ among the ports of Genoa and Antwerp? After five months of fieldwork, and almost fifty semi-structured interviews to “privileged witnesses”, I have had the possibility to explore deeply the port of Genoa, as well as the city. The empirical results so far show the distinctive characteristics of a composite and contemporary phenomenon under way, since the dock labour regime has been eroded from within, but some persistent organizational forms of labour are still there. 66 6th Ethnography and qualitative research conference Power relations and reciprocal constraints among the actors involved are the results of path dependent routines and practices sedimented in the time, that have led to a strong decrease of the bargaining power during the last decades. The increase of container traffic in the terminal container of Voltri Prà has been accompanied by a significant reorganization and efficiency improvement, made necessary by the ever-growing search for competitiveness by the terminal operators. Furthermore, the phenomenon of naval gigantism has produced a working concentration, with an increase in peak workloads and productivity levels. This has led to a worsening of the qualifications required by the flexible labour pool. The difficult match between the skills required and available skills produces the use of temporary staff from agency Intempo and double shifts. Some key actors have talked about “self-exploitation”, in o rder to chase the productivity required by the market. All these aspects are still under analysis. The empirical strategy is to collect data about the evolution of flexibility, labour productivity in function of the of labour costs, safety, the incidence of labour cost per container, etc., in order to assess such trends, and compare them with the case study in the terminal container of Antwerp, in Belgium.