US

(Beacon Press 2008)

David Bacon’s third book on migrant labour in the modern economy extends his previous focus on Latino immigration in the US to consider its global dimensions. Combining his signature of personal testimonies allied to politically informed analysis, he shows us that the two topics of globalisation and migrant labour are intimately related.

The character of this ‘logistics revolution’ occupies the first part of the book. At its heart are increasingly global and economically integrated supply chains governed by a new ‘pull’ model of production. Here ‘point of sale’ data capture at the retail end dictates new production runs (their scale, unit cost, design, quality and timing) and compressed delivery and inventory schedules. Independent businesses are now more closely integrated in these networks, through electronic data interchange, with the mega retailers (as translators of consumer preferences) in the driving seat overall.

Changes in the realm of production in the direction of shorter, differentiated product runs and contingent scheduling (on an ‘as needed’ basis) are central features of this ‘revolution’. They are accompanied by powerful tendencies towards outsourcing and offshoring. Flexible production networks involving multiple subcontractors have now spread around the globe as parent companies (especially the mega retailers) seek out ever lower prices, prompting the rise of the global sweatshops and much noted industrial development in Asia. To coordinate this whole matrix of production and distribution sites, a whole new ‘science’ and business of ‘logistics’ has sprung up, aiming to maximise the flow of goods and draw upon transportation innovations like containerisation and intermodal freight movement.

The actual movement of freight along these supply chains is brought to life in a detailed case study of the Los Angeles / Long Beach port area, the largest in the US and key conduit for the influx of Asian and Chinese manufactured imports. The range of actors, functions and powers uncovered here illustrates the internal complexity of such systems, but the authors never lose sight of the ultimate control exercised by those importing the goods in the first place. It is the big box retailers who decide what is moved, by whom, when and at what price, their demands then transmitted down the supply chains to financially constrain suppliers, contractors and their workforces – in much the same way as they do in the realm of production itself. Bonacich and Wilson then take us through each stage of this global distribution process in turn.

At its most general level, Containerisation (the uninterrupted carriage of cargoes across land and sea) and Intermodalism (the integrated transportation of container cargoes) are key drivers of the growth of the US West Coast ports and international freight movement. Their introduction has created closer links between transportation modes, allowed door-to-door cargo deliveries, vastly expanded port facilities and quickened their operations. As world trade continues its heady expansion, the US has seen a rapid rise of imports, with Los Angeles / Long Beach acting as national gateway and handling around 40% of all this trade.

Oceanside, major shipping lines have seen their operations grow equally rapidly, with their massive vessels competing against each other for orders from importing retail giants. One absolutely central change here is the ‘offshoring’ of container shipping to open registry countries. Their ‘flags of convenience’ vessels operate with minimal regulation and rely exploited workforces (recruited from across the Global south) to significantly lower transportation costs. Deep water ports like Los Angeles / Long Beach serve as major destinations for these vessels and their cargoes.

Once ashore the mountains of containerised imports are dispatched from ports overland by rail or truck, using intermodal transportation techniques to speed up operations. In Southern California Bonacich and Wilson find an elaborate network of transport modes, firms and workforces involved. Freight may be shipped directly from port by rail, or tractor - hauled to railheads or warehouses (the function of ‘harbour drayage’). Intermodal rail yards, handling up to ½ million trucks yearly, and situated beyond the ports, have sprung up in recent years, offering rail interchange facilities between companies and fast links inland.

All this growth and development has however brought significant social consequences for the Los Angeles / Long Beach area – in particular severe congestion and rising pollution levels, sparking community protests.
Final destination for the freight covered in this study is the inland warehouse or distribution centre (DC), site of the rapid inventory assemblage and replenishment demanded by JIT retailing. Here the new logistics of cross-docking facilities, inventory checking, customisation of generic stock and new automated technologies are all available to rapidly move cargoes from port to store in a ‘floor ready’ state. These are massive structures designed to accommodate multiple entry and dispatch points, at most able to handle 70,000 containers daily and covering an area of 1 million square feet!!

What the authors actually find in the Southern Californian Inland Empire area is a set of mega national import centres, run for TNCs by third party logistics firms, which operate on a smaller JIT platform of ‘point of sale’ import reordering and cross-docking – it is the regional DCs that use the JIT model to its fullest. Like the port area it serves, the Inland Empire is similarly plagued with congestion and pollution problems, testament to the unregulated economic growth both areas have undergone.

So, what about the workers in all this? The authors take up this theme in the final part of their book, examining the impact of the ‘logistics revolution’ upon five workforces that bring ‘supply chain management’ to life: seafarers, dockers, rail workers, port truckers and DC staff. They test here Bonacich’s earlier prediction that this revolution would bring more contingent working relations and patterns, weaker unions, racialised labour forces, and an ultimate lowering of labour standards. Here also the impact of wider political legislation upon the logistics revolution itself is clearly displayed – in particular the spur that transport deregulation has given to new working procedures.

The results are uneven. Contrast the case of those best resisting its worst effects (the longshore workers powerfully organised in the ILWU) who maintain a strategic degree of control over freight movements and their labour power, with the offshoring of seafarers jobs in the shift to ‘flags of convenience’ shipping, one accompanied by seriously deteriorating terms and conditions.

Port truckers have been worst affected – deregulation, the expansion of non-union trucking firms and an influx of independent ‘owner operators’, especially in the harbour drayage sector, have allowed contingent working relations to supplant once secure unionised labour and Teamster power.
In the rapidly expanding warehousing sector temporary employment has taken off, as the authors find amongst the 90,000 strong Inland Empire workforce, creating significant barriers to improving labour standards.

However Bonacich and Wilson do not see this as a one sided process circumventing labour organising and union power. The logistics revolution contains its own set of vulnerabilities that labour can address, ones enhancing the strategic power of transportation and warehousing workers who perform the essential circulatory functions the whole system relies upon. For instance, global production depends on long supply lines and just in time inventory scheduling that multiplies available points for disruption; its transportation nodes are equally vulnerable to labour conflict (as seen in the ILWU lockout of 2002 in Los Angeles / Long Beach); and greater commonality exists amongst those employed by the same mega employers – whether in manufacturing, distribution or retailing – allowing joint pressure to be exerted upon the likes of Wal Mart.

From such a recognition US labour could, say Bonacich and Wilson, develop a new strategic approach to organise entire industrial complexes like that of logistics in Southern California. Here the necessary daily intersections between logistics workforces, their channels of communication and coordination, when combined with their knowledge of its weak points, suggest possibilities for US labour to regain power in the global economy. All this depends however upon the unions admitting that traditional single plant or employer approaches are redundant in the wake of the logistics revolution, putting new strategies of inter union cooperation and experiments in ‘flexible organising’ on their agenda. Capitalism, as ever, continues to produce its own opposition. What is missing so far is its mobilisation.

Review by Richard Leitch

Her concern is to show how groups situated outside the AFL-CIO mainstream have struggled and organised themselves to achieve economic justice through the creation of ‘poor workers’ unions’ (PWUs). In so doing these independent organs have shown the wider labour movement a more expansive, democratic option that represents “the best possibility for the future” (229), a ‘social justice’ unionism which has now established a foothold in the mainstream. Within the hidden history she reconstructs Tait also points to the misunderstandings in our views of relations between labour and other social movements.

The birth of this alternative ‘second front’ in US labour lay in the 1960s social movements for civil, women’s’ and welfare rights. Each of these struggles had central economic justice demands that encouraged the subsequent formation of new organisations for those excluded by the narrow agenda of AFL-CIO - its neglect of racial and gender equality, and for brining contingent workers, the unemployed and welfare recipients into its fold. As Tait documents, the civil rights campaign foregrounded issues of fair hiring practices and equal pay in employment, setting up ‘freedom unions’ on a community basis to press its demands. Meanwhile the women’s movement was struggling for recognition for waged and unwaged domestic labour, establishing an array of organisations directly concerned with their marginal position in the workplace. Welfare rights activists similarly set up national bodies to argue for guaranteed minimum incomes for those with caring responsibilities and a just welfare system. These initial efforts are described by Tait as labour organising within the social movements.

From these beginnings Tait tracks the development of PWUs over the next three decades, focusing upon the efforts of those seeking to unite waged and unwaged workers; the community based ‘United Labor Unions’ set up by ACORN; and the wave of independent Worker Centres emerging in immigrant communities.

The overlap between welfare and waged work was a central concern for the PWUs, reflecting the shifting trajectory of low wage workers between these two worlds, and the explosion of mandatory ‘workfare’ programmes. Organisations such as ACORN (the Association of Community Organisations for Reform Now) thus addressed workers rights in both spheres. In the hands of the Rhode Island Unemployed Workers Union (later the Rhode Island Workers Association) this approach involved directly recruiting members from the welfare lines and becoming a bargaining agent with its officials, before moving on to successfully organise low-wage workforces in the healthcare, jewellery and office sectors. So prominent did it become that the SEIU union later offered it affiliation as an autonomous local, which it agreed to.
As workfare programmes took off PWUs undertook many organising projects amongst these captive workforces tens of thousands strong, though here the efforts of the United WREP Workers and ACORN in New York and San Francisco’s POWER were often blocked by mainstream union opposition.

By way of contrast ACORN’s ‘United Labor Unions’ set pout to organise the growing numbers of poor workers across whole industries, utilising social movement style tactics of one-to-one recruitment, often outside the workplace, and building strong links with other community groups. Major advances in the homecare workers sector and their ‘living wage’ campaigns in the 1980s led to their affiliation to SEIU too.

As for the independent Worker Centres, they developed an innovative response to the multi-layered oppression faced by immigrant communities, acting both as labour and community advocates. Relying upon direct action and educational activities to build rank and file participation, centres such as New York’s ‘Workplace Project’ and ‘Chinese Staff and Workers’ Association’ pursued improvements in pay and conditions amongst hitherto unorganised workforces (day labourers, garment workers, restaurant staff). Their ‘Black Workers for Justice’ counterparts in North Carolina used a similar approach to link labour and civil rights struggles of black communities in the South. Strongly rooted in ethnic solidarities, these centres had significant success in building alliances between Asian, Afro-American and Latino workforces. That achievement is vital for building wider solidarities in today’s diverse labour movement.

Tait’s historical narrative reveals PWU relations with mainstream unions to be uneven and at times problematic. Reaching out to previously unorganised workforces through unorthodox tactics, and combining labour with community struggles over social amenities (housing, healthcare, education, transport, sanitation) and social inclusion (discrimination, citizenship status) the PWUs clearly stood at some remove from the AFL-CIO norm. It has only been more recently that their ‘social justice’ campaigning style has been widely recognised and applied by some progressive mainstream unions in the face of a multi-faceted challenge to union power – membership decline, the growth of new low-wage service industries, increasing numbers of migrant workers and of contingent working patterns immune to traditional union approaches. This cross-fertilisation has also been powered through the gradual entry of PWU activists and organisations into the mainstream.

The mid 1990s’ reform movement within AFL-CIO, turning it towards a more expansive organising agenda, furthered the scope for collaboration with the PWUs. But as Tait notes, despite some promising developments (the multi-union backed ‘Jobs with Justice’ campaign for instance) AFL-CIO still resisted the rank and file activism and democratic participation the PWUs embodied.

As a new entity within the US labour movement Tait suggests the fundamental significance of the PWUs lies in their broadening of the institutional forms, participants, tactics and agendas available to it. In place of the well established bureaucracies and routines of business unionism, PWUs deploy direct action tactics, community-based organising and rank and file participation to build vibrant, democratic organs. This organising style and form is one especially well suited to the atypical and contingent working patterns of marginal workforces and the combination of labour and community issues they confront in their daily lives.

The PWUs have dramatically expanded our conception of who can be defined as a ‘worker’ – to cover welfare recipients, workfare participants, unwaged domestic labour, and those performing a proliferating range of service tasks in the informal economy. Their potential participation in expansive organising projects gives a voice and role to hitherto excluded groups.

Simultaneously the PWUs have pursued a much wider agenda of issues, spanning both workplace and community, which these groups of workers are concerned with. This has led them to recognise the centrality of social amenity provision and social inequalities (gender, cultural, racial oppressions; the struggle for citizenship rights) in the struggle for economic justice. Here it is relevant to note that the typical workforce a PWU addresses is composed of peoples of colour, immigrants and women.

Tait argues that such a shift has crucially enabled the PWUs to make the leap from workplace struggles into broader arenas, “moving beyond the bargaining table and into the community and political life of the nation” (229). They have come to appreciate how class conflicts are played out in many aspects of everyday life and are inextricably linked to other forms of inequality and oppression. The historic 2004 Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride, a national campaign for immigrant rights and an amnesty for the undocumented, one uniting mainstream unions and PWUs, stands as a classic example of this dynamic.

One point worth taking up here is how the PWU history challenges contemporary views of the relationship between labour and other social movements. Instead of a clear division between the two, and an accompanying shift to ‘identity politics’ beyond class, Tait’s work reveals the centrality of struggles around ethnicity, gender and citizenship to today’s labour movement. It is comprised of diverse cultural communities having to address labour and community concerns and build solidarity with each other, both within and beyond the workplace. PWU tactics, agents and agendas illustrate that given views of social movements as extra-class, and of who belongs in the category of worker, are fundamentally mistaken. That is a crucial insight for us to take on board.

In her concluding chapter Tait argues that although the PWUs hold the key to labour movement renewal, they are not a sufficient condition of this. Small in scale, still marginal to much union activity and financially vulnerable, it is only through a deeper collaboration with the mainstream that the future can be built. To shift US labour in the direction of a more expansive, inclusive and democratic mode of organising will not be easy. There is however no other, or better, road to renewal.

The first main theme of the collection to note is its mapping of the scale of Wal Mart’s operations. It is the largest private employer in the US, Canada and Mexico; successfully established in Europe; key driver of manufacturing in China; now eyeing the prospects for conquering the vast, untapped consumer markets of the Asian giants (China, Russia, India). This extensive web of suppliers and retail outlets is highly integrated and subject to a striking degree of centralised control, ruthlessly marshalled by Wal Mart’s own IT and logistics systems right down to individual shop floor level. As David Hoopes notes this ‘big box’ retailer has deployed advanced satellite communications networks for over two decades now - plotting sales, inventory and replenishment - and then used such information to steadily exert its influence over suppliers and distributors. Part of this has been the shift to a global sourcing of its products from East Asia, where new manufacturers were willing to dance to Wal Mart’s tune in exchange for access to the mass US market.

With size comes power. Bonacich and Hardie argue that the major result of all these developments has been the emergence of a new pattern of global production and distribution, placing the big box retailers firmly in the economic driving seat, with dramatic consequences for manufacturers, distributors and their workforces.

Producers now find themselves locked into retailers’ global supply chains, their operations tailored to the consumer preference (or ‘point of sale’) data captured by and passed on electronically from these outlets. Major aspects of production runs – length, frequency, design, labelling, price and quality – are now dictated by the retailers on a ‘take it or leave it’ basis: for Wal Mart alone has over 30,000 suppliers to choose from worldwide. Petrovic and Hamilton point out that this dominance extends to producers physically moving their sales departments closer to Wal Mart’s Arkansas HQ, and electronically linking themselves into its IT systems. Their organisation and logistics thereby become further aligned to Wal Mart priorities.

In the transportation sector, a similar stranglehold has taken place. Increasingly global supply chains and more frequent distribution (‘just in time’ replenishment) are central aspects of Wal Mart operations, leading it (and other global retailers) to lock in distributive procedures within its overarching system. (The Arkansas giant actually has its own warehousing and trucking fleet). Independent logistics firms now find themselves forced to meet retailer demands to retain contracts.

All along these supply chains, workforces across the globe are being squeezed by their immediate employers to meet the rigorous demands of the retailers. In the US logistics sector, Bonacich and Hardie find labour standards weakened as working relations become more contingent – through outsourcing, temporary employment and the transformation of once stable unionised workforces into ‘independent contractors’. Reinforcing this, the strident anti-union practices of parent companies leave little scope for organising particular employers, who can easily be dropped for more pliable alternatives. The trajectories of US West Coast port truckers and seafarers are used to illustrate these harsh dynamics at work.

Within the Wal Mart retail empire itself, working conditions come under scrutiny from a number of the contributors. Thomas Adams argues that discount retailers generally have to enforce a more authoritarian shop floor to hold down labour costs and thereby secure their profitability. A raft of strategies has been deployed here, by Wal Mart and others.

These cover organisational innovations (dividing ownership of stores and their internal departments to obstruct worker solidarity); extensive monitoring and surveillance (effected through simplification of work tasks, performance requirements, use of private investigators and lie detector tests); and a virulent anti-unionism, where pro-union employees are sacked, organisers arrested and workforces artificially fragmented to scupper any union election. This is, he notes, a pattern increasingly spreading throughout the low wage service-retail sector of the US economy.

Ellen Rosen’s research backs up this view, showing how the systematic understaffing of each Wal Mart store forces its workers to display a ‘total flexibility’, accepting any and all tasks given to them, regardless of appropriate training, or required rest breaks. Working patterns are continually subject to revision in the light of sales figures, leading to cuts in working hours and insecurity amongst employees. Low wages, limited benefits and gender discrimination against its predominantly female workforce complete the charge sheet.

One final aspect of big box retailing examined in the book is its spatial impact upon the urban environment. According to David Karjanen, Wal Mart’s global supply chain spatially dislocates production from consumption, polarising urban life in the US. Local economic development falters through this dislocation, one reinforced by its well publicised destruction of local commerce. Its low wage employment regime weakens local demand whilst placing extra burdens on state resources, to fund health benefits. Public resources are also stretched by its incessant request for fiscal support to site stores, and the demands upon transport and public infrastructures their out of town locations generate. Karjanen concludes that big box retailing imposes significant costs upon communities and urban environments for benefits that are, at best, uncertain.

So the collection provides chapter and verse on the rise of retail power. What is to be done? Here a number of political responses are put forward. At the most global level, Bonacich and Hardie argue that current production and distribution systems render traditional single plant/ employer collective bargaining ineffective. Such efforts can easily be outmanoeuvred through production relocation.

Instead new modes of labour resistance are called for, with inter union cooperation and ‘flexible organising’ of contingent workforces as likely options. These global supply chains do, they say, contain their own points of weakness – key transportation nodes, the overall reliance upon frequent (disruptable) deliveries. And this has actually increased the strategic power of the superintendents of the entire circulatory system – workers in transportation and warehousing.

Wade Rathke’s piece, by way of contrast, tackles the issue of organising Wal Mart itself in the US. With store-by-store organising a well documented failure, Rathke calls for the formation of a ‘workers association’, open to all current and ex Wal Mart workers, and pursuing a rights based agenda against the manifold legal transgressions of the employer (along labour, gender, immigration and civil rights axes). Living wage campaigns and public policy positions could be developed along the lines of community actions taken by ACORN in Florida and Chicago. Rathke argues US labour now has a number of potential allies, whose progressive initiatives (green, gender, migrant or anti-sweatshop based) all confront the power of big box retailing, opening up the genuine possibility community – labour alliances.

At both general and specific levels then, global retailing is calling forth its own oppositions, providing space for new political practices to be launched. That is the best conclusion to draw from this book.