Author: Carlotta Benvegnù
Managing differences in segmented labour markets: Emerging spaces of work and their social relationships, an inquiry into logistics in France and Italy
The process of internationalization of production - and thus the needs for supply chain integration – has produced a strong growth of logistics sector.
Therefore, highly integrated logistics processes driven by “just-in-time production and distribution” contrast with fragmented layers of subcontracting, and the efforts to increase the faster and smoother movement of goods seem to have had a negative impact on working conditions and weakened the capacity of the unions, as many researches have underlined (Cowen, 2014; Bonacich Wilson 2008). However, during the last years the logistics sector has been the site of several struggles and strikes in many countries.
The paper, drawing on an ethnographic research inside two warehouses of the same multinational company in France (Paris) and in the North of Italy (Padua), as well as on a series of in-depth interviews with workers (30), will focus on the impact that different policies of recruitment and management of the workforce have on social and work experiences of local and migrants workers, as well as on unions strategies.
Since almost a decade, in Northern Italy migrant workers employed by a cooperative-system have organized - thanks to the support of rank-and-file unions - strikes and blockades, asking for, and often obtaining, better conditions of work, an improvement of workplace relations, the application of the collective bargaining agreement, and the right to unionize.
While in France traditional unions in the sector seem to be unable to adapt to the growing segmentation of the labour market as well as to the changes in labour identities, in Italy the process of unionisation within grassroot organisations relayed on social connections and especially on ethnic and community networks, that have been converted in an instrument for building information and solidarity between workers.
From this point of view, the Italian case - where connections between inside and outside the workplace are strong - highlight how the accumulation of power by workers unfolds “socially” and not just within the single workplace.