The management of logistics has been revolutionised over the past 30 years and has been regarded as a key determinant of business competitiveness. Logistics includes a broad range of activities such as handling, transport and storage of goods and materials. Most companies provide some of these logistic functions in house, but others have chosen to outsource some functions, especially the activities of handling and transportations to logistic service providers (LSPs), in order to improve their performance and reduce their costs.
During the last years the fast expansion of the online shopping market in Europe influenced the growing of an “army of workers engaged in the connected activities of logistics, distribution and delivery” (Newsome et al. 2016). The increase of competition in the market of logistic and parcel delivering relies on one side upon IT transformations directed at securing more demanding and time critical levels of service delivery, and on the other side on the supply of flexible labor services at minimum cost. The latter requirement, in particular, fuelled a myriad of subcontracted supply chains and relationships (Newsome et al. 2016).
Outsourcing was historically and largely “domestic to other firms or organizations in the near vicinity of the outsourcing firm. The Firm' strategy was to use a combination of “internal and external arrangements, shifting the balance between in-house and outsourced production”(Doellgast & Gosper, 2010).
According to Gutelius (2015) “Firms restructure under pressure to improve performance, adopting strategies to shape-shift and re-making relations of inclusion and exclusion. The prevailing value-creation strategy is downward pressure on the cost of labor”. For this reason it is important to examine the “boundaries of inclusion and processes of linking and delinking subsets of workers to better understand the differential implications for worker segments and their attachment to the supply chain”.
This contribution focuses on the Italian division of an International Courier Delivery Services Company in the city of Rome and analyses its strategies of the organization of work as well as the outsourcing of some of the activities.
The analysis is based on almost a year of participant observation on the internal dynamics that occurred at workplace level. The covered period ranges from the end of 2013 to the end of 2014.
In this case, the company decided to carry out the activities of parcel handling outside the boundaries of the firm, by commissioning the execution of these activities to a consortium. This consortium had in turn sub-contracted these jobs to other two cooperatives.
The main aim of the research was to examine the effect of the outsourcing of these activities on:
a) working conditions inside all the warehouses of the company located in Rome (which was rather far from the city center);
b) the relationships between workers and trade unions at workplace level;
c) trade unions’ strategies to represent unionized workers and to improve their working and living conditions.
Two different unions were compared: a Confederal union with a long tradition, whose unionized workers were mostly direct dependent by the Company; an extra-confederal, radical union whose unionized workers were mostly migrant and atypical workers of cooperatives.
The analysis highlights that the outsourcing of parcel handling activities has resulted in the split of "the labor environment and its workers" into an “internal space”, managed by the Company with a direct control over the workforce, and an “external” one, indirectly managed through contracts to cooperatives. This process has affected working conditions, and in particular differentiated migrant workers from Italians. In fact while the company workers were mostly Italians, direct dependents and covered by national collective agreement, the cooperative workers were mostly migrants, atypical workers (as “dependent-partner of the cooperatives”) and employed in heavy and dirty works, with low wages and few labor rights.
The process of outsourcing has also influenced the strategies adopted by unions in order to defend and protect its members.
We observed how the two different unions have chosen to adopt different strategies, on the basis of the interaction between the followings internal factors:
1. characteristics and interests of unionized workers (also influenced by labour market occupational segregation by class, gender, race, age);
2. organization’ structure: complex and bureaucratic organization or a lean organization of workers and activists;
3. union source of power: if legitimated either by the practice of social dialogue with the employer/by the exchange with the State, or if legitimated by the unionized workers;
4. the type and amount of economic resources available to the union: either deriving from public funds or only from its members;
5. the logic of action: either based on membership or influence;
6. logic of goal formation: in a short time or in a long time perspective;
7. logic of effective implementation: social dialogue and collective bargaining or various form of conflictual and collective actions.
The comparison between the confederal trade union and the extra-confederal and autonomous one, showed differences on strategies which can be understood not only by focusing on firm’ strategies but also by examining the relation between unions and workers, the union structure and resources, and the way union conceive the interplay between labor and capital.