Disciplina
de
los
cuerpos
y
biopolítica
de
las
poblaciones

Work stoppages have a significant negative impact on the Gateway not only in the short run as traffic is diverted to competing ports, but in the long term as well, since reliability is critical for gateways to attract and retain customers. This measure is not limited to the ports themselves; labor disruptions at railways or trucking firms, by border/security officers or by any other component of the supply chain would have an impact. The ideal target for this would be zero work stoppages.

— InterVISTAS

The constant managerial obsession with discovering ever more

“perfect” systems of visibility, inspection and control speak not of the weight of domination bearing down upon weak, disciplined subjects but of the resilience and potency of worker resistance.

— Alan McKinlay, Managing Foucault

The people who move the world can also stop it.

— Jo Ann Wypijewski

Figure 21 offers a conceptual map of the application process for a Trans-portation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC). The TWIC is a pivotal element of the United States’ layered and risked- based approach to supply chain security in the broader “War on Terror,” which the U.S.

administration is actively rebranding as “overseas contingency opera-tions” (Anderson 2011, 206). It brings the United States into compliance with the International Maritime Organization’s 2004 International Ship and Port Facility Security (ISPS) code, itself implemented at the direct behest of the United States (Boske 2006). The diagram reveals many key elements of the program— the multiple “vettings” of workers involved in the TWIC, the multiple databases to be managed, and the many actors involved in administering the initiative: the Department of Homeland Security, the Coast Guard, intelligence agencies, and so on. The diagram reveals that a key set of activities within the turquoise zone of “govern-ment responsibility” are in fact to be managed by a contractor working for the Transport Security Administration, though it does not mention the contractor selected: the notorious Lockheed Martin. Like the TWIC program itself, this diagram opens up the minutia of workers’ movements for greater scrutiny and state control. The TWIC rewrites the limits of state surveillance and supplants labor protections, but it does so without presenting itself as labor law. Most important, the TWIC blurs the bor-der between crime and terror and between police and military authority.

These borders between different authorities and legal codes for governing figure 21. Transportation Worker Identification Credential process map.

Source: Courtesy of the U.S. Coast Guard.

insecurity are fundamentally geographic; they are the once- sacred borders of national sovereignty. With almost identical versions of the TWIC imple-mented in many ports around the world, the credential aims to secure the critical “seam” of the maritime border, preempting disruption by keeping

“dangerous people” away from logistics systems (Cowen 2007, 2009).

These programs are framed as exceptional measures targeted to a highly specialized group of workers, yet they establish precedents in critical nodes in the global social factory and are a wedge in an ongoing restructuring of work and labor. As one installment in the broader architecture of supply chain security initiatives, the TWIC aims to protect the speed and integrity of the circulatory systems of supply chain capitalism (Tsing 2009).

There is nothing new in the observation that capitalist logics aim to speed up circulation. As Marx a century and a half ago in 1867, capital-ism perpetually refigures the relationship between space and time in the interests of speed. And yet, these general tendencies within capitalism that were heightened with the globalization of logistics and the rise of just- in- time production systems over the past four decades have been taken up with new force within a context of the securitization of trade. The logics of supply chain security redefine disruption of the logistics system as a matter of national security, sanctioning a social war on workers.

This chapter investigates the ways in which the recent securitization of supply chains intersects with the growing pressure on labor produc-tivity that accompanied the revolution in logistics, containerization, and just- in- time production techniques over the last four decades. The central focus here is the body of the worker; from the caged bodies of work-ers in warehouses to the crushed bodies of longshore workwork-ers on the docks, this chapter explores the messy and violent everyday labor of the “seamless” logistics system. It offers a sketch of the ways in which the broader goals of accelerating the circulation of capital through the seamless movement of stuff are recast and intensified through the secu-ritization of supply.

Death and Disruption

At 10:43 p.m. on June 9, 2007, Earle Hopson, a business agent of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), sped through the streets of East Vancouver en route to a night shift on the busy downtown docks. The ILWU— formed in 1937 around principles of antiracism, rank- and- file democracy, and economic justice— represents all West Coast dock workers from the southernmost ports in California to the most northerly facilities on the continent in places like Kodiak, Seward, Dutch Harbor,

and Anchorage. At the gates of the globe’s greatest consuming nation and its “foyer” to the north,¹ the ILWU handles (quite literally) a vast share of the world’s trade. ILWU members load and unload ships; transfer containers to trains and trucks; plan port space; serve as electricians, fore-men, and safety inspectors; operate tug boats; and undertake myriad other forms of labor that keeps stuff circulating. Their labor is a linchpin in systems of global commodity flows. When ILWU members act politically, they can create impassible chokepoints that have ripple effects through entire systems of production and distribution. The vital location of their labor alongside their intransigent international political orientation make the ILWU a powerful force, and a thorn in the side of corporate managers, in the vast and complex arena of global trade.

Earle spent eleven years as a casual worker “climbing the boards” to become a member of the union. A decade or more of precarity (of irregu-lar, uncertain, and inadequate hours) is par for the course in the industry.

Only the most persistent return to the hiring halls, week after week and year after year, slowly logging shift hours and ascending to become can-didates for stable employment and full political standing. “Climbing the boards” refers literally to the process whereby a worker’s timecard is inserted into the slots of an alphabetized system of boards that organize the status of casual employees— with “AA” at the top and working all the way down the alphabet. There can be hundreds, even thousands of casuals on the boards at any given time, depending on the size of the local and the state of business in the port. This long initiation process combines with the union’s uncompromising stance in matters of economic, racial, and social justice to make thick affective ties between those who achieve mem-bership. It is rare to meet an ILWU member who doesn’t present a union logo on their body. T- shirt, jacket, cap, or pin, the docker’s hook graces all these forms and is a waterfront worker’s fashion standard. The union’s tight embrace of the Wobblies motto, “An injury to one is an injury to all,” highlights this collective spirit. The language of family and home exceeds metaphor; blood ties across generations of waterfront workers often connect union members. When kinship is not biological, it is still defined in familial terms— as adoptive or chosen family, often marked by shared spaces. “Up and down the coast, we all think of our dispatch hall as our home,” Earle explains. I have visited enough locals and heard it repeated often enough to know it is true. “If it’s not for my union,” Earle continues, “I might as well not have kids, I might as well not have family, I wouldn’t have my house, I wouldn’t have my daughters.” But the eve-ning in question was not one of peaceful familial ties. This was instead

a moment when bonds between dock workers were violently torn apart.

This was an increasingly common event of graphic death on the docks.

“The one that messed me up real good was Lucio,” Earle explains.

“I went up the boards with Lucio . . . Lucio— he fell from a crane doing a specialty job.”

Just before pulling up to the union office that evening, Earle received a call from Serge, the daytime business agent: “Meet me at the Pacific Eleva-tor, there’s been a horrible accident. It’s Lucio.” Earle continues,

I sped over there . . . but I got stopped by the train. So it was me, Serge, and Johnny— Lucio’s brother, and the ambulance. Stuck behind this train. We’re on the phone with our employers. Johnny kept saying

“cut the train, cut the train.” The guy is like near death, could be dead. I get out of my car and I’m running down the length of the train looking for a switchman. Couldn’t find him. They were completely down at the other end. Me running at that time— not a good sight.

[Earle laughs.] I had just quit smoking and was like 300 pounds. So I finally gave up looking for a switchman, and I came back, and we eventually cut the train after like 5 or 10 minutes.

We get through, we park and then Johnny starts running, and I start running. We get up on board the vessel . . . and we know where it is because that’s where everybody is standing . . . and I get there, and I see my friend, my guy, lying in a pool of his own blood . . .

And you know I had never dealt with this before . . . but just talk-ing to the past business agents who had . . . the guys I grew up with.

And they said, “First thing you do is get everybody away, if you can.”

So I tried getting everybody away and then I went to Johnny, Johnny was all over his brother . . . and I was trying to get him away. So I just pulled him away and held onto him. And the first aid attendants and the paramedics worked on him. And . . . it . . . It seemed like forever.

And then finally . . . and I’m watchin’ Lucio, and I’ve got Johnny in a bear hug. And I hear him start screaming out my name now, and I look over and as he’s screaming he’s got this horrific look on his face, his face is just contorted— he’s in so much pain and anguish.

That’s what fucked me up for the longest time . . . So I continued to work my shift . . . and I started smoking again that night.

As a business agent (the formal intermediary between workers and employ-ers), it was Earle’s job to negotiate situations just like these: to manage relations between outraged workers and the employer, Dubai Ports World.

But this was not an event that could in any meaningful way be “medi-ated,” and this is not simply because of Earle’s own trauma and rage. In

this collision of metal and body is also a collision of interests and efficien-cies. Disruption has already featured prominently in this tale of globalized logistics. Efforts to preempt disruption and recover systems of commod-ity circulation in its wake underpin the entire enterprise of supply chain security investigated in chapter 2. Disruption marks the interruption of normal life. The problem of disruption in a world built on fast flows takes on epic proportions; the reliance on speed combines with the intercon-nectivity of supply chains to propel disruption in one seemingly discrete locale to system- wide crisis. Typically, in the world of globalized logistics, disruption means that flows of stuff stop. Yet the disruptions at play in Earle’s story hold grotesque irony; the stationary train became an impass-able wall for the obstructed ambulance. The very infrastructure built to make stuff move long distances becomes an impassible barrier to local connectivity. Lucio’s dying body could not be reached because the infra-structure of just- in- time global logistics systems blocked the way. And yet, the train blocking the local road is not the only form of disruption; Lucio’s broken body, a final disruption of life itself, also interrupts the workings of the port. “Productivity” disrupts itself. While Earle returned immedi-ately to work after Lucio’s lifeless body was taken away, the ship couldn’t move for days.

The Body as Battleground

Lucio’s broken body marks a particular and bloody conflict between grow-ing demands for greater productivity in the ports and the deaths these demands produce. The loss of Lucio is a tragic tale but one that regularly repeats. Port workers’ bodies frequently fall from heights, get crushed between machinery, are trapped under collapsed stacks, are impaled on metal rods, and are severed when cargo shifts on ships. Those who don’t succumb to immediate injury often expire after years of exposure to tox-ins that that come naturally with industrial employment. HIV also has a powerful life in transport industries, including longshoring— a feature of the combined mobility and unfreedom of so many workers in this sector (ITF n.d.). The effects of trauma— like the loss of Lucio— are also embod-ied; workers manage grief and anxiety with substances like nicotine. Port, transport, and logistics are consistently ranked among the most danger-ous industries by governments that monitor workplace health and safety (HSE 2012; WorkSafeBC 2011). In the United States, port work is second only to mining in the number of annual industry workplace deaths and injuries (Bonacich and Wilson 2008, 182). In California, warehousing

and trucking were listed on the “highest hazard occupation” list of the Occupational Health and Safety Association for 2009– 10 (Lydersen 2011;

UEPI 2011). The association cites extreme heat stress and lung cancer from diesel exhaust among health risks for people working in warehouses and driving trucks and locomotives.

The high stakes of logistics work is in part a feature of the inherent dangers of laboring in an environment of big machines and metal boxes.

Heavy equipment and human flesh have never made for easy bedfellows.

Yet the danger is also due to the speeding up of supply chains in recent years. While the speed of circulation of capital has been a concern for as long as capital has accumulated, the revolution in logistics has changed the game. According to Edna Bonacich and Jake Wilson (2008, 159– 60), the logistics revolution “without a doubt, has made business enterprises more efficient.” They highlight the reduction of inventories, transport costs, and prices of consumer goods that the revolution provoked. Rely-ing on principles of just- in- time production pioneered in U.S.- occupied Japan, the revolution in logistics has made goods flow faster.

Technological advances, alongside changes to labor regulation, have led to increased intermodality— or a more “seamless” system of infrastructure

figure 22. Gantry cranes in the Port of Elizabeth, New Jersey, 2006. Source:

Photograph by the author.

and physical circulation. Ships are unloaded in a fraction of the time that they were a few decades ago— from weeks to just a few days for a stan-dard container ship. Cargo moves from ship to rail or truck in minutes, and distribution centers are often fully automated. In some, goods are continuously circulating on conveyor belts. Yet how this speed is achieved and at what cost are precisely what makes logistics a terrain of struggle.

After asserting that the revolution in logistics has been good for business, Bonacich and Wilson (2008, 159– 60) also ask whether the effects have been positive for labor, and their answer is clearly negative. They highlight three trends that have intensified globally in logistics labor in the wake of the revolution: (1) increased contingency, deriving from the rise of tem-porary, contract, and generally precarious forms of labor; (2) weakened unions, as a specific result of the former but also an active contributor to making logistics labor more precarious; and (3) racialization, as a result of the deliberate targeting of more economically precarious communities by companies but also because racialized workers are already concen-trated in precarious forms of work. Without a doubt, conditions of work in this sector vary dramatically at a global scale— and these trends there-fore articulate differently in different places. We return to questions of the unevenness of labor regimes in an increasingly integrated global system shortly, but for now it is enough to say that aggressive privatization and deregulation are compromising conditions of work in this sector.

The deregulation of the transport sector in the United States was cen-tral in engineering these effects. Chapter 1 established that deregulation of the U.S. transport sector was not only a feature of the revolution in logistics but a process underpinning it. While it took shape differently in marine, trucking, rail, air, and telecommunications, across all these sec-tors it served to undermine the strength and scale of organized labor, led to a decline in conditions of work, deepened racialized wage gaps, opened the field to intermediary operators, and oriented the industry toward the transnational rather than national shipment of goods (LaLonde, Grabner, and Robeson 1970; Peoples and Saunders 1993; Peoples 1998; Bonacich and Wilson 2008; Rodrigue and Notteboom 2008).

The revolution in logistics also marks the rise of corporate retail and logistics giants with aggressive and punitive approaches to labor man-agement. The world’s largest corporation in terms of both revenue and employment, Wal- Mart is notorious for its low wages, poor benefits, and highly gendered and racialized labor force (Ortega 1998; Fishman 2006).

Wal- Mart may be widely known as a mammoth retailer, but in the world of business management it is known as a logistics company (Bonacich

2005; Davidson and Rummel 2000; Dawson 2000, 2006). Wal- Mart has the largest civilian satellite network, second only to the U.S. Department of Defense. And it is through complex systems of pull production that rely deeply on real- time IT connection between seller and producer that the corporation distinguishes itself. Wal- Mart rose to its current size of close to nine thousand outlets and more than two million employees over the course of only five decades— its exponential growth from a single store in the early 1970s is a testament to the power of the logistics revolu-tion. Wal- Mart has been setting a path for the industry (Fishman 2006;

Hernandez 2003; Spector 2005) in both its own employment and con-tracting practices and those of the logistics sector more broadly through its key role in lobbying government through industry employer groups like California’s West Coast Waterfront Coalition (Bonacich and Wilson 2008)— notorious for their aggressive labor relations with the ILWU.

All these shifts and others have contributed directly to the deaths on the docks. As Paddy Crumlin, president of the International Transport Federa-tion, asserts on the ITF website, “The health and safety of men and women port workers can be threatened when casual or untrained labor don’t fol-low health and safety best practice, also when they work for long hours or

figure 23. A container ship in the Port of Vancouver, British Columbia, 2007.

Source: Photograph by the author.