The War on Europe’s Waterfront — Repertoires of Power in the Port Transport Industry
| Date | 01 June 2006 |
| Published date | 01 June 2006 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.2006.00499.x |
British Journal of Industrial Relations
44:2 June 2006 0007–1080 pp. 305–326
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2006. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Blackwell Publishing Ltd.Oxford, UKBJIRBritish Journal of Industrial Relations0007-1080Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2006June 2006442305326Articles
Repertoires
of Power in the EU Port Transport IndustryBritish Journal of Industrial Relations
Peter Turnbull is at the Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales, UK.
The War on Europe’s Waterfront —
Repertoires of Power in the Port
Transport Industry
Peter Turnbull
Abstract
When the European Commission proposed a Directive On Market Access to
Port Services in February 2001, the International Transport Workers’ Federa-
tion (ITF) issued a declaration of war on Europe’s waterfront. To protect
established terms and conditions of employment in the port transport industry,
the ITF developed a strategy of internationalization that required dock workers
to engage in a new politics of scale wrought by globalization. A new repertoire
of collective action — based on more effective union articulation (i.e. stronger
interrelationships between the workplace, national and international levels of
organization) combined with the activities of new labour networks that con-
nected port workers at the trans-national corporation, port range and pan-
European levels — enabled dockers to sink the Directive in the European
Parliament in November 2003. The dockers’ victory will not be lost on other
European unions or indeed other global union federations, although their success
will doubtless prove more difficult for other occupational groups to emulate.
1. Introduction
In recent years, students of industrial relations have paid scant attention to
workers’ interests or the processes through which they define a collective
identity and then acquire, and exercise, collective control over the resources
needed for action in pursuit of their interests (Kelly 1998: 25–6). Such neglect
is especially problematic in an international context as workers’ interests are
invariably embedded in their everyday working lives, whereas the logic of
globalization appears to call for a more ‘detached’ identity that will ‘travel’
across borders (Tarrow 1999). Likewise, the ‘repertoire of power’ or ‘inven-
tory of available means’ (Tilly 1984: 308) that workers can draw upon is
usually local, often national, but rarely international. On occasion, the local
306
British Journal of Industrial Relations
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2006.
is sufficient to combat the global (e.g. Herod 2002a) but, in general, ‘If
workers are to enjoy collective rights in the new world order, they will have
to invent new strategies at the scale of international capital’ (Tilly 1995: 5).
Some commentators see this as an almost hopeless task and have already
predicted a ‘fading away’ of the labour movement as a major force of social
cohesion and workers’ representation (e.g. Castells 1997: 354). But it is too
soon to sound the knell for organized labour: ‘The worker strategies con-
structed in the industrial age have been undermined not because globalization
has eviscerated labor power but because it weakened old labor strategies and
spurred aggressive new elite strategies with which labor has yet to cope’ (Piven
and Cloward 2000: 414). If this is the case, we need to ask: How is labour
coping with the new strategies of (global) capital? How are union identities
and repertoires of contention (re)framed in an international context? What
resources are available to labour in an age of globalization?
These questions are initially addressed in the following section through a
consideration of the spatial as well as the social operation of international
capitalism. The fact that social life takes place in particular geographical
configurations is often overlooked in the analysis of industrial relations (see
Herod
et al
. 2003), but, as international competition intensifies, it is not
uncommon for workers, and some capitalists, to choose a defence of place
over the defence of their class interests (Herod 2002b: 9–10). This calls for
geographic scale to be conceptualized as ‘politically constructed’, rather than
the more usual preordained hierarchical framework for ordering the world
from ‘local’ to ‘global’, because scale (re)definitions alter and express changes
in the geography of social relations by strengthening power and control by
some while disempowering others (Swyngedouw 1997: 169). This process is
often represented as a series of institutional and other changes arising from
globalization that dissolve worker power by enormously expanding employer
opportunities for exit (Piven and Cloward 2000: 420), but capital mobility
varies significantly across different industrial sectors and the geography of
buying and selling markets for labour can heavily influence whether, and to
what degree, workers (re)define their interests in ways that will help them
to overcome their collective action, co-ordination and coalition problems
(Levi and Ahlquist 2004).
In the transport sector, for example, it is often noted that high sunk costs
and the immobility of (infrastructure) capital invariably denies transnational
corporations (TNCs) a ‘spatial fix’ (i.e. relocation of capital to lower-cost
locations) in the face of declining profitability (Turnbull 2000: 369). In specific
transport industries such as ports, the immobility of capital, combined with
strong workplace union organization, has led some commentators to suggest
that dock workers may actually be ‘impervious to spatial fixes’ (Gentile 2004).
However, while port employers might be ‘immobile’, major customers (e.g.
international shipping lines, shippers, freight forwarding and distribution
companies) are not only in a position to exercise choice between different
ports of call but are actively seeking to reconfigure the socio-spatial processes
To continue reading
Request your trial