During the last 30 years, the logistics sector has become a key function of the global economy. Nevertheless, social sciences have only recently taken into account the importance of this transformation, trying to depict its impact on the economic systems as well as on working conditions. This conference aims at fostering a dialogue between different researches that, on an international scale, address logistics as an object, a perspective, or even as an analytical concept.

Programme

9H00-9H10 Welcome

9H15-9H30 Introduction

• Carlotta Benvegnù and David Gaborieau, Logistics as an approach to analyze labour transformations inside global supply chains

9H30-13H00 Labour in warehouses

Discussant : Cécile Cuny, Université Paris Est

• Cédric Lomba, CNRS : Drug supply chains: pharmaceutical managers and warehouse workers in a highly standardized organization
• Bettina Haidinger, University of Vienna: The role of liberalisation of postal and transport services for fragmented and precarious employment in parcel delivery in the EU
• Lucas Tranchant, University of Paris-Ouest: From one warehouse to another. Temp work at the core of a local logistics labour market
• Carlotta Benvegnù, University of Paris 8: Comparing labour process in parcel delivery: Padua and Paris
• Haude Rivoal, University of Paris 8: Masculinities in the workplace : a gendered analysis of a supply chain company

14H00-17H30 Labour transformations in logistical capitalism

 Discussant : David Gaborieau, University of Paris-Est

• Pavlos Hatzopoulos, University of Athens : Piraeus Port as a Machinic Assemblage: Labour, Precarity and Struggles
• Moritz Altenried, University of London: Labour, Technology, Space: Logistics in Contemporary Capitalism
• Jack Wilson, California State University: The Logistics Revolution and the Impact on Labor
• Phillip Staab, University of Hamburg: Raising productivity in consumption - the political economy of e-commerce

 17h30-18h00 Conclusion, Giorgio Grappi, University of Bologna

Organization

• Carlotta Benvegnù (Unipd, Cresppa-CSU) / carlotta.benvegnu@gmail.com
• David Gaborieau (Université Paris Est, Lab’Urba) / david.gab@wanadoo.fr

Journée d’étude internationale (en anglais) organisée dans le cadre du programme de formation-recherche CIERA « Les mondes de l’entrepôt », associée au programme ANR WORKLOG, cofinancée par le CIERA, l’Université Paris-Est et le CSU-CRESPPA.

Argument

During the last 30 years, the logistics sector has become a key function of the global economy. Nevertheless, social sciences have only recently taken into account the importance of this transformation, trying to depict its impact on the economic systems as well as on working conditions. This conference aims at fostering a dialogue between different researches that, on an international scale, address logistics as an object, a perspective, or even as an analytical concept.

Ensuring the circulation of commodities, semi-finished products and raw materials, logistics can be conceptualized as the infrastructure of globalization. The reorganization of the economies into transnational systems that criss-cross national borders, linked to the transfer of industry plants in low-wage countries, as well as the development of just-in-time production, have impulsed the important growth of the sector. But the development of logistics as an autonomous sector is also the result of the externalization fostered by the big companies of those functions previously considered as marginal or not strategic. At the same time, the evolution of the logistics sector can also be connected to the growth of the retail industry and, more recently, to the expansion of the e-commerce - which hidden face is the concentration inside warehouses of commodities destined to supermarkets or directly to customers. Therefore, depending on the way we observe it, logistics can be presented as a key sector or as a subaltern function, as an innovation or as the prolongation of something older. However, its development has undoubtedly impulsed major transformations of the economic systems, which explains why logistics is today considered as a crucial tool to analyse contemporary capitalism.

From a managerial standpoint, logistics promotes an ideal of smoothness and fluidity, perhaps even the ideal of a dematerialized economy regulated by flows of information. On the contrary, observed from the bottom up, logistics appears as an industry where a large labour force is increasingly needed in order to assure the circulation of goods and raw materials, rather than a continuous flow requiring little interventions. This workforce is either concentrated inside warehouses, ports and airports, or scattered within various companies. Logistics activities are heterogeneous relying on the type of products and markets, and recruitment processes depend also on the sectorial, regional and national contexts. However, logistics shows a number of characteristics that allows to study it as a whole: subcontracting chains, flexibility, traceability control and growing pressure on working conditions. Some important trends have also been observed concerning the employment structure, in particular processes of precarization and racialization of the workforce, as well as the weakening of labor unions. This leads to ask the questions of what a “logistics working class” might be, which place it might occupy inside the social hierarchy, which kind of subjectivity it expresses, as well as to investigate the forms of resistance that are played in this sector.