Abstract
Both workers and employers must come to grips with capitalism’s spatial organization, and how they do so shapes the kinds of political behaviors in which they engage. In this article the authors explore how two different groups of European workers—dockers and seafarers—have responded to liberalization efforts and suggest that their differential success in resisting labor market deregulation can be explained, at least in part, by how they are spatially embedded in particular places and what this means for their abilities to make common cause with others across space.
Recent years have seen a growing research focus on the geography of workers’ lives (e.g., Herod 1998, 2001; Castree et al. 2004; McGrath-Champ, Herod, and Rainnie 2010). In particular, this scholarship—what some have called “labor geography”—has sought to show how the geographical contexts within which workers find themselves can have significant impacts on their political and economic behavior. Amending Marx’s famous dictum somewhat, a fundamental tenet of such research has been the recognition that workers make their own geographies, but not necessarily under the conditions of their own choosing.
In this article, we explore matters of workers’ spatial mobility and embeddedness and some of the geographical issues workers face when trying to organize across space. We do this to provide a context for understanding the recent political behavior of two different groups of workers in the European maritime industry: dockers and seafarers. 1 Significantly, both groups are organized under the European Transport Workers’ Federation, and both have been affected by the growing liberalization and deregulation of labor markets under the European Union’s Common Transport Policy. However, whereas dockers have been able to resist some of the industry’s efforts to make labor markets more flexible, seafarers have been less successful in so doing. Although there are several reasons for this, we argue that one of them relates to the different degrees to which these two groups of workers are spatially embedded in particular places and the varied success they have had in making common cause with others in different locations across the EU’s space economy.
The article itself is organized as follows. First, we outline several conceptual developments that have taken place concerning matters of unionism and space—that is to say, we present some tenets of what labor geography is about. Second, we explore recent transformations in the European maritime industry, specifically movement toward labor market deregulation and the liberalization of the industry. Third, we detail some of the consequences of this for workers. Finally, we postulate as to why dockers may have been more successful than seafarers at resisting deregulation and how this relates to spatial matters.
On Geography and Labor Politics
The practice of unionism and developing solidarity between workers is inherently geographical, for it is “a process of coming together . . . over space” (Southall 1988, 466). Thus, workers must make common cause with compatriots located in other places and, in doing so, must address often significant geographical variations in the working conditions found in different communities across a region, a nation, or even the entire globe. Likewise, workers must come to terms with how capital seeks to use the unevenly developed economic landscape to its own advantage, such as playing workers in one community against those in another in various “races to the bottom.” Although the literature on labor geography is now quite large (for overviews, see Leir 2007; Castree 2010), in this article we want to focus on two specific sets of issues: spatial embeddedness and organizing across space.
Spatial Embeddedness and Political Practice
Social life does not take place on the head of a pin. Both capital and labor are embedded in particular places to greater or lesser degrees and are constituted over space. Hence, as Harvey (1982) has shown, capitalists must ensure that the economic landscape is arranged in particular ways—as he puts it, they must create “spatial fixes,” whereby raw materials, plant, and labor are brought together in certain configurations in particular places so that accumulation may occur. Some capitals, however, are much less geographically mobile than are others. The significant amounts of capital sunk in a steel mill or car plant mean that, once built, its location cannot be changed as easily as might, say, a garment sweatshop, where one may have to do little more than pick up sewing machines and relocate them somewhere else. Such issues of differential embeddedness and mobility, K. R. Cox and Mair (1988) have suggested, can greatly affect capitalists’ economic and political strategies. In particular, those forms of capital that have a much greater degree of “local dependence” (i.e., nonmobility) than do others tend to be very heavily involved in boosterist activities designed to ensure that their local economy remains healthy—if they cannot relocate to pastures greener, they will often seek instead to bring circulating capital to themselves by establishing various local progrowth organizations (see Humphrey, Erickson, and Ottensmeyer 1989). Given its own reliance on a healthy local tax base and its interest in avoiding the citizen unrest that unemployment may cause, the local state is also frequently involved in such activities.
Workers, too, however, have an interest in ensuring the viability of their local communities, especially if they are not particularly geographically mobile because they are perhaps too old to move or cannot sell their homes and are tied by their mortgages to their communities of present residence. This can likewise affect their political behavior. Hence, they may also engage in local boosterism by offering wage cuts or perhaps through deciding to tamper their militancy for fear that overt shows of strength may scare potential investors away (for such an instance, see Herod 1991). This has at least two sets of consequences for analyzing workers’ political praxis.
First, it frequently means that workers must navigate two sometimes conflicting (though intertwined) identities—their class identity, as shaped by their relationship to the means of production, and their geographical identity, as shaped by their relationship to particular places. Put another way, sometimes workers must choose between pursuing their class interests, such as by developing a united front against employers, and pursuing their spatial interests by defending their communities against others. Such decisions are invariably shaped by the vagaries of the moment. Hence, Hudson and Sadler (1986) detail how European steel workers, when faced with the threat of the closure of mills in the late 1970s, initially developed strategies based on class interests, challenging their employers over the need to reduce capacity in the industry. However, when it became obvious that some mills were indeed going to be closed, many switched to a spatial politics of ensuring that it was their mills that stayed open and other communities’ mills that were closed.
Second, though, and perhaps more importantly for our purposes here, such embeddedness can provide workers with various economic, political, and cultural resources that are important in organizing. In particular, embeddedness helps create what Bourdieu (1977) calls a habitus, by which he means an environment in which ways of knowing and living are structured and particular places become reservoirs of being in the world. In such a habitus, the connections between workers that crystalize through their close spatial proximity to one another, can serve as a basis for developing militant practices of trade unionism. Consequently, the places in which workers live are not simply inert points on a map but active shapers of ongoing political practice, to the extent even that their physicality can influence the social relations that develop in them (for how the physical layout of workplaces, communities, and even whole economic landscapes can shape the practice of labor relations, see Herod 2010). They are, as Hudson (2001, 267) puts it, a “continuously fashioned mélange of meanings, values, and relationships that are effected by shared and ongoing social practices [which] construct, sustain, and transform the context in which economic, social, and political life is produced and reproduced on a daily basis and into which new members are socialized.” The concept of habitus, then, provides a tool through which to understand militancy, for it shows how the political and economic structures of place can outlast those who initially created them, providing a pool of tradition and resources on which workers may draw. For example, Darlington (2005, 151-52) shows how militancy in Merseyside, England, has been sustained over time, even as industrial restructuring has devastated employment on the docks and in the region’s car plants from which it initially emerged. Based on this analysis, he suggests that, given the right resources of place,
it might be possible for industrial and political traditions and patterns of behaviour predisposed to adversarialism, which have been initiated and sustained within certain spatially bounded communities, to be reproduced through time and continue to have a long-term influence on industrial relations—even in the context of dramatic changes in the structure and pattern of employment overall.
Such a discussion of place, space, and habitus provides a framework through which to understand, at least in part, how dockers and seafarers have responded to efforts to liberalize the European maritime transport industry.
Geographical Dilemmas When Organizing across Space
If spatial embeddedness (or lack thereof) is one concept that can help explain workers’ political action, the second is that of the construction of geographical scale, especially as it relates to the development of new scales of collective action. Again, there is a vast literature that has come out of the labor geography field in recent years concerning such matters (e.g., Herod 1997; Wills 2002; Tufts and Savage 2009). The key issue, though, has been the focus on how workers must negotiate the unevenly developed geography of capitalism if they are to develop common cause with workers located elsewhere.
The issue of the geographical scale at which labor relations occur has been central to many contemporary developments in the world of work. For instance, the growing globalization of production has led many to call for a reconstituted scale of collective bargaining, one that takes place not at the national level but at the global level. Likewise, many unions have looked to reconstitute themselves by transcending national scales of organization to form supranational entities—the 2008 merger between the United Steelworkers of America and Britain’s Unite union represents such a development, as does that of the former British National Union of Marine, Aviation and Shipping Transport Officers and the former Dutch Federatie van Werknemers in de Zeevaart (Federation of Merchant Marine Workers) to create the new union Nautilus International, which Swiss maritime workers have recently also voted to join. At the same time, in many industries employers have sought to localize bargaining as a way to facilitate the whipsawing of workers against each other. Hence, in the U.S. national pattern agreements were broken up in the 1980s in industries such as autos, trucking, and meatpacking. Similar assaults have taken place in other nations. In Australia, for instance, the Howard government’s Workplace Relations Act of 1996 involved a significant decentralization of collective bargaining to the local level through the expanded use of Enterprise Bargaining Agreements (on its impacts on the mining industry, see Ellem 2006), while in the European Union the collective bargaining trend in recent years has been toward greater company level or local agreements and away from national and sectoral agreements (Sciarra 2005).
Efforts to develop new scales of labor relations so as to link workers in one community with those in others, though, throw up a number of geographical problems for workers because of how the economic landscape is highly unevenly developed (Herod 1997). For instance, it is quite often the case that the cost of doing business in one community is very different from that of doing business in another, which makes developing, for example, spatially even wage rates difficult. This was an issue faced by several international labor federations (including the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, and General Workers’ Unions and the International Metalworkers’ Federation) in the 1960s and 1970s, when they tried to develop common wage policies for workers across various transnational corporations—wages in Global South countries were usually very much lower than those in Global North ones, which made standardizing them difficult (R. W. Cox 1971; Bendiner 1987). Likewise, in the U.S. maritime industry containerization and the building of the interstate highway system in the 1950s and 1960s unleashed new competitive pressures along the East Coast as shippers serving the New York region could more readily ship through lower-cost ports in southern states and yet still serve markets in the heavily populated northeast. Consequently, the leadership of the New York–based International Longshoremen’s Association successfully struggled to replace the traditional port-by-port collective bargaining model with that of a coastwide contract that would both bring wages and working conditions up to the level enjoyed by New York dockers and prevent shippers from being able to undermine New York’s rates by diverting cargo to southern ports (Herod 1997). In similar fashion, in Britain during the 1970s the Transport and General Workers’ Union fought to extend the U.K. National Dock Labour Scheme to nonscheme ports like Felixstowe and Dover so as to prevent shippers from using these low-wage ports as a way to undermine pay in the industry (Turnbull, Woolfson, and Kelly 1992, 67-71). 2
Attempting to make common cause across space by developing new geographical scales of labor relations, then, presents a number of spatial questions for those seeking to do so. For example, workers must decide whose wages and working conditions will set the standard across the industry or country. Thus, will they try to bring all workers’ wages and conditions up to the levels of the most favored in the industry or country, will they try to establish a minimum floor below which none will fall, or will they try to develop some kind of “spatial average”? Each of these positions has different sets of consequences. For instance, if they seek to bring all workers up to the levels of the most favored, employers in high-wage regions may be prevented from fleeing to lower-waged regions, but it may also mean that some employers in those lower-waged regions will be forced to close up operations because they now have to pay the higher wages set by an industry-wide or national agreement, an outcome that may increase unemployment there. On the other hand, if they decide simply to have a contract that places a minimum wage and conditions floor across an industry or country, this may help those workers in the worst workplaces but may not engender much support from those in the best ones, who may see that they have little personally to gain from engaging in lengthy strikes to secure these improved conditions. For its part, deciding to seek some kind of spatial average may avoid the pitfalls of the other two options but may end up satisfying nobody.
Finally, it is important to recognize that particular groups of workers may sometimes see their interests best served by negotiating nationally, but on other occasions may prefer to bargain locally. For example, although in the 1960s and 1970s southern dockers fought to establish a coastwide master contract that would secure for them the higher wages enjoyed by New York dockers, by the mid-1980s these higher wages meant that it was becoming increasingly difficult for unionized dockers in southern ports to compete for work with nonunionized ones. Consequently, southern unionists broke out of the coastwide agreement and returned to negotiating locally. Likewise, in Britain, during the 1989 strike against the Thatcher government’s efforts to abolish the National Dock Labour Scheme as part of an effort to liberalize dock labor markets and inject market competition between ports, dockers in the port of Sheerness in Kent broke ranks to negotiate a local agreement with employers, a position contrary to that of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, which preferred a national settlement (Turnbull 1991).
Such discussion of creating alliances across space highlights some of the geographical tensions that challenging the European maritime industry’s deregulation and liberalization may unleash. Developing new geographical scales of action, then, such as attempting to implement Europe-wide bargaining for dockers as the European Union becomes ever more socially and spatially integrated, requires workers and unions to engage actively with the highly uneven geography of the industry wherein different ports import and export widely divergent types and tonnages of cargo and regulations concerning working conditions and other matters vary significantly from country to country.
Recent Transformations in the European Maritime Industry
Seaborne trade is an important component of the European Union’s economy. Two-thirds of the EU’s borders are coastal (the twenty-two EU member states with a sea border have an estimated combined coastline of 136,106 km), and its maritime regions account for over 40 percent of its total GDP (European Transport Workers’ Federation 2007a). 3 Shipping represents one of the Union’s largest export industries, as 90 percent of EU external trade and nearly 40 percent of internal trade is seaborne (European Union 2009, 2011b). More than 800 European ports handle 3.5 billion tons of cargo annually, with approximately 64 percent of this tonnage being inward goods and the rest outward goods (European Commission 2009, 8). These figures are important because, according to Kumar and Hoffmann (2002, 36, emphasis added), maritime transport is “the most globalized industry.” Thus, “any liner shipping company from anywhere in the world can now easily enter new markets and provide its services globally. Equivalently, international operators are now in a position to take a concession of a container terminal in any port of the world.” Notteboom (2004) suggests that this intensified competition puts great pressure on maritime businesses to manage costs, particularly labor costs. In turn, this has encouraged workplace deregulation and market liberalization in the industry. Among other things, such deregulation and liberalization have involved efforts to remove/reduce worker protections, thereby making labor markets more flexible, to privatize formerly state-owned assets, and also to eliminate some of the restrictions on ownership of assets by foreign investors. Such developments have affected both dockers and seafarers through placing pressure on wages, through fostering greater competition as shipping lines increasingly compete for routes and cargo, and through progressively transforming ports from public goods into profit centers for private capital run on post-Fordist lines (Notteboom and Winkelmans 2001; Brooks and Cullinane 2007).
Dockers have largely felt the effects of deregulation and liberalization through changes in how ports are managed. In general, there are three models of port management. The first—the “comprehensive” model—consists of public port authorities investing in infrastructure and operating technical-navigational services (pilotage, towage, mooring) and cargo handling (stevedoring, stowage, transshipment and other intraterminal transport, and warehousing), including directly employing dock labor. Although this was once the dominant model in Europe, since the early 1990s it has become far less common than it once was and today is mostly confined to “developing and newly industrialized economies” (Turnbull and Wass 2007, 587). The second is the “tool” model. This model consists of the public port authorities investing in infrastructure and owning technical-navigational and cargo-handling equipment, but allowing private companies to execute these operations. In this model dockers are “typically employed by a state-mandated labor pool or union hiring hall, which allocates them to private operators on a daily basis depending on operators’ labor demand” (Turnbull and Wass 2007, 587). The final model is called the “landlord” model and consists of port authorities investing in basic port infrastructure only, while the private company invests in superstructure (terminals, buildings, facilities, warehouses, etc.). Moreover, the private company executes all technical-navigational services and cargo handling, including directly hiring dockers. In the last decade, this “landlord” model has become the predominant form of port organization in the EU (Turnbull and Wass 2007). This is important because, as Slack and Fremont (2005, 117) suggest, whereas the “comprehensive” and “tool” models each gave ports a “local character,” the implementation of the “landlord” model has resulted in European ports increasingly ceding container handling services and the hiring of dockers to a small number of transnational terminal operating companies (TTOs). Currently, just three TTOs account for 55 percent of European container traffic.4 Such a concentration of ownership and erasure of local character has facilitated the growing “Europeanization” of port operations across the EU.
For their part, seafarers have been affected by shippers’ increasing practice of seeking lower costs through registering their ships under flags of other states, a practice known as using an open registry (OR) or securing flags of convenience (FOC) (Llácer 2003). Though this practice is not new, it has been growing in recent years, and OR fleets currently compose over 54 percent of the world’s seaborne annual shipping deadweight tonnage (Cullinane 2011).5 Hummels (2007, 140) suggests that operating costs for OR ships are from 12 to 27 percent lower than for traditional registry fleets, with “most of the estimated savings coming from manning expenses.” Thus, annual crew costs, such as those from a typical Northern European closed register fleet, can be double or even four times those of an OR, depending on crew selection (Llácer 2003).
If employers have been keen to reduce costs, EU policy makers have seen deregulation and liberalization as a means to continue “eradicating the barriers to the through movement of cargoes” (Kumar and Hoffmann 2002, 51). Indeed, according to Kumar and Hoffmann, all shipping-related issues have become subservient to the goal of greater trade liberalization through deregulation of markets. The ranking of these priorities can be seen most clearly in the evolution of the EU’s Common Transport Policy (CTP). This evolution can be divided into four distinct periods, with each granting the CTP greater authority over maritime policy.
1957-72: Exclusion of the Maritime Transport Industry from the CTP
Initially, the CTP had little influence over the maritime transport industry. Although the six original member states of the European Economic Community (EEC)—Belgium, France, West Germany, Italy, Luxemburg, and the Netherlands—recognized the importance of a common policy for transportation to facilitate the free movement of persons and goods throughout Europe, they failed to include maritime or aviation completely. Articles 75 to 83 of the Treaty of Rome established the CTP’s legal basis and determined that European transportation would undergo a harmonization of technical standards and rules for service providers, would allow for cabotage to increase competition and efficiency while driving down prices, and would extend and connect existing national infrastructure to “provide easy flow of goods and persons throughout Europe.”6 Article 85 of the Treaty of Rome, however, divided transportation into two groups—inland modes (rail, roads, and inland waterways), which it covers, and international modes (aviation and maritime), which it does not (European Union 1957). At the time, maritime transport was regulated primarily by the individual member states (Schmidt and Giorgi 2001).
There are two explanations offered in the literature for why the original EEC members chose to exclude maritime and aviation transport from the original CTP. The first is that the states believed that the inland modes of transportation were more essential to a common market than were the international modes (Kohler-Koch and Eising 1999). A second explanation suggests that these sectors were chosen because they created the least discord among the member states. Called a “gradualist ‘sectoral’ approach of integration,” this explanation suggests that compromises would begin small but that bigger and bigger bargains would gradually be made (Chlomoudis and Pallis 2005, 26).7 The exclusion of such important modes of transportation was indicative of a larger powerlessness of the policy before the 1970s. Many scholars have characterized this period of the CTP as a “disappointing performance” (Chlomoudis and Pallis 2005, 26; Despicht 1964; Button 1985). Lindberg and Scheingold (1970, 165) suggest that the EEC was “unable to translate a general commitment to participate in a collective decision-making effort into an acceptable set of policies of rules.” Consequently, during this time the Council of Ministers of Transport had little regulatory power and was used primarily for an “exchange of ideas” on transport (Schmidt and Giorgi 2001).
1973-92: Articulating a European Maritime Policy
In 1973, the enlargement of the EEC to include Denmark, Ireland, and the United Kingdom increased the importance of maritime transportation for two reasons (Paixao and Marlow 2001). First, economically the United Kingdom and Denmark had significant maritime transport industries. Second, the United Kingdom and Ireland are islands and thus, for the first time in EEC history, two countries were exclusively reached by air or by sea. In 1976, the increase in competition from nonmember states, including the presence of pricing competition from Eastern Bloc countries’ shipping fleets, which undercut the number of EEC merchant fleets and seafarers, led the European Commission to publish a communication to address these issues (Paixao and Marlow 2001). The movement by the Commission was slow and mostly reactive, however, until after the incorporation of Greece in 1981. A decade later the European Community Ministers of Transport put forth a maritime package forming the basis of the European maritime common policy. This package served three main functions. First, it legally extended the CTP to include air and sea transport. Second, the package required all international shipping services within the Community to be administered by any of its registered operators on an equal basis—that is, national governments could no longer discriminate in favor of their own shipping lines or make special agreements with other member states to coordinate shipping services between their national lines. Instead, all member states had to allow equal competition among national shipping lines, shipping lines from other member states, and third-party shipping lines that were formally registered within the European Community. Third, it provided legal mechanisms for challenging what were perceived by some to be unfair pricing and competition systems being utilized by both member and nonmember states operating within what would become the European Union.
1993-2000: Accelerated Liberalization
After the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 and the creation of the EU, the European Commission showed its commitment to reducing “the remaining technical barriers . . . hindering the growth of the maritime sector to further aid market integration” (European Union 2009). That same year the Commission created the Maritime Industries Forum to examine the then-current maritime policies and determine strategies to improve the global competitiveness for EU shipping, shipbuilding, and maritime services. It also published a communication, “Toward a New Maritime Strategy,” which supported an increase in both the use of short-distance sea shipping and of ports facilitating intermodal supply chains. The reasoning was twofold: using seaways instead of roads would reduce the burdens of pollution caused by road transport, and the EU could guarantee free competition among short-distance sea-shipping lines in and between ports.
2001-Present: Proposed Liberalizing Reforms of the Past Decade
There have been several liberalizing reforms in the past decade that have threatened dockers and maritime workers. With regard to the former, following the Lisbon Agenda in 2000, which pushed for the liberalization of all transportation sectors, the European Commission published a “Proposal for a Directive on Market Access to Port Services” (Pallis and Tsiotsis 2006). Better known as Port Package I, this proposal recommended that port authorities allow at least two commercial cargo handlers for each port in which two handlers would be economically viable. The goal of such a proposal was to ensure both interport and intraport competition by eliminating any private or public strategy of price discrimination and monopolistic rent seeking. A second important aspect of the proposal addressed the issue of self-handling, wherein a port user provides for itself one or more categories of port services (e.g., a ferry operator unloads its own cargo using its own land-based personnel and equipment) (European Industrial Relations Observatory 2003).
The proposed allowance of self-handling provoked varied reactions from stakeholders. For example, trade unions were against self-handling services, declaring that the proposal would turn existing unionized ports into “ports of convenience,” with increased competition creating an interport and intraport race to the bottom. In contrast, shippers united in support of the proposal. For their part, port authorities were largely divided, though some were greatly concerned with the existing national rules that required them to employ only local unionized dockers to load and unload cargo. After intense discussion, Port Package I was rejected in November 2003, and the members of the European Parliament explicitly ruled in favor of unionized dockers, noting that in recent history “only professional dockers employed by port authorities have been allowed to do this type of work” and the introduction of other workers might “significantly degrade safety conditions in EU docks” (European Industrial Relations Observatory 2003, para. 5).
The dockers’ victory, however, appeared short-lived. In 2004, the European Commission published a second proposal (Port Package II). This proposal differed from Port Package I in three ways. First, it clarified that cargo-handling services must be authorized by port authorities based on “objective and transparent” standards, which many interpreted to mean the services offering the most competitive prices (Mellwig 2005). Second, Port Package II shortened the authorization duration for services from at least twenty years to less than twenty years (and usually fifteen to twenty years). And finally, Port Package II stated that self-handling would apply only to land-based shipping line employees and should only be extended to maritime workers under rare exception (Alderton and Winchester 2002). In January 2006, though, Port Package II was likewise rejected by the parliament. Public pressure is believed to be one of the prime motivations for this package’s denial.
Significantly, the European Commission has actively involved workers, specifically the European Transport Workers’ Federation (ETF), in negotiations over transport policy (ETF 2009). In this regard, in the run-up to the March 2011 release of a white paper, the purpose of which was to create a “Single European Transport System” that would break down “residual barriers” between the EU and its immediate neighbors in transport and infrastructure policy, as well as encourage open transport markets and undistorted competition within the EU, the ETF issued a formal consultation letter that stated, in part,
From the perspective of transport workers[,] the liberalisation policy and its focus on facilitating the internal market and globalisation . . . happens on the expenses of workers in the transport industry: huge employment reductions in some sectors, replacement of quality jobs by low quality jobs, increase in insecurity, loss of European know-how, discrimination of workers also according to their nationality, emergence of agency workers, emergence of (fake) self-employment, increase in atypical work and precarious labour, out-flagging of work contracts, lack of enforcement of the posted workers[’] directive [(]for example in cabotage services[)], increase in flexibility (working time, work intensity, etc.), reduction of investment in training and health and safety at work, [and] social dumping. (ETF 2009)
Nevertheless, despite this opposition prior to the white paper’s issuance, as of yet the ETF has made no formal postissuance declaration to protest the paper’s content, though its web page suggests that it feels that the guidance set forth by the Commission was “inadequate” and that the EFT would be “intensify[ing] its campaign immediately” (ETF 2011).
Whereas the growing deregulation of port work has threatened dockers’ working conditions over the past decade, by way of contrast for seafarers the issue has been not the loss of workplace protections but the low level of such protections in the first place, a situation that has only grown worse as more and more ships have registered in open registries under non-EU flags. In addition, in order to compete with FOC ships, traditional registered fleets have begun to hire non-EU crews. Thus, as the European Commission noted in 2002, since the mid-1980s “[t]he total number of EU maritime workers employed on EU registered vessels [had fallen] by 40% [while the number of] non-EU maritime workers on the same ships increased by 19%” (European Union 2002, sec. 1.3).
In light of these changes, in 1998 the Commission released Directive COM(1998)251 concerning the staffing conditions of all ships operating within European waterways. The directive proposed that all ferry and passenger ships flagged outside the EU but operating within European waterways be subject to the same terms and conditions of employment, as well as the same health and safety standards, as those flagged in the EU. Some have suggested that the Commission’s motivation for issuing COM(1998)251 was growing concern over the labor shortages among seafarers and the belief that such a directive might even the playing field between EU and non-EU seafarers competing for jobs within the Union (European Union 2002). Still others believe that the directive was motivated by several fatal shipping accidents in European waterways in the 1990s, in which, investigators found, the accidents were facilitated by insufficient safety standards and the lack of a common language among non-EU seafarers (International Maritime Organisation 2000). 8 Regardless of the motive, the directive represented an effort to standardize shipping operations across the EU.
Though the commission argued that its directive would encourage fair competition as “shipping companies established outside the Community should not receive more favourable treatment than shipping companies established in the territory of a Member State,” the directive was amended in 2000 and finally withdrawn in 2004 because of lobbying efforts from both EU and non-EU shipping lines (ETF 2010b). In its newsletter published in 2005, the European Community Shipowners’ Association commended the directive’s withdrawal, suggesting that it would have been “counterproductive in that the employment prospects of EU maritime workers on the global market could well [have been] damaged.” In the years since, the Commission has brought forward no new proposal to change staffing conditions. In response, the Political Secretary for Fisheries, Dockers, and Maritime Sections at the ETF has described the ten years since the initial directive as filled with “procrastination and paralysis” (ETF 2010a).
Threats That Such Changes Pose to Different Groups of Workers
Both dockers and seafarers, then, have been subjected to efforts to deregulate labor markets in the European maritime transport industry. Indeed, in an International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) survey administered to thirty-two unions affiliated with the ITF, two-thirds of national maritime transport unions reported experiencing a deregulation of employment, privatization of port services, and liberalizing of competition. In the same study, which was administered to two-thirds of the dockers within the ITF, a majority of dockers reported “a marked deterioration in job security, health and safety, union influence, and other substantive conditions of employment” (Turnbull and Wass 1997, 137). Moreover, the unions reported a 22 percent decline in port employment, which most attributed to deregulation efforts by the European Commission and national governments, as well as redundancy schemes being used as an alternative to retraining and redeployment measures. Such corrosion of conditions is significant for, as Turnbull and Wass (1997, 128) note, historically, “in a ‘free’ labour market, irregular patterns of work . . . led to irregular patterns of income and consumption, ill-health, and intense competition for jobs which[,] at best[,] resulted in physical violence as dockers literally fought for work.”
But it is not just dockers’ work lives that have been affected by the liberalization of their industry. The deregulation of the European maritime transport industry has also had deleterious effects on the quality of life for seafarers. As a way to quantify what has been happening, in 1996 the ITF surveyed over six thousand seafarers, who can generally be divided between those who work aboard ships flagged in Western European states and those who work aboard non-EU flagged ships (Alderton and Winchester 2002). 9 The ITF’s goal was to test for correlations between where a ship is registered and the working conditions upon that ship. The survey revealed that seafarers who work aboard ships flagged outside of the EU reported longer work hours, greater workloads, more episodes of overt racism against them, and more open hostility toward unions by shipowners and they perceived themselves to have less rest and recreation time, to be less well compensated, and to work aboard ships that were less well maintained. With the decline in European ships being registered under European flags since the survey was administered, these conditions are likely to have gotten only worse for seafarers working within the EU.
Method
The subsequent sections of this article examine how these two different groups of European workers—dockers and seafarers—have responded to such liberalization and deregulation efforts. For this section, we have relied primarily on written documents from the EU. Our goal below is not to isolate and test explanatory variables that may affect the differences in success between these two groups but, rather, to use the conceptual framework of labor geography to provide some insight into the forces shaping each of these groups of workers’ lives.
Opposing Liberalization: A Tale of Two Unions
In the EU both dockers and seafarers are organized under the ETF. The ETF was founded in 1999, bringing together former members of the Federation of Transport Workers’ Unions in the European Union and the European affiliates of the ITF. It is currently the only pan-European transport workers’ organization. It represents more than 2.5 million workers from 231 transport unions and forty-one European countries and has branches in railways, road transport and logistics, civil aviation, fisheries and tourism services, inland waterways, ports and docks, and maritime transport.
As outlined above, the ETF launched successful campaigns against Port Packages I and II, both of which could have negatively affected dockers. Following the publishing of the first “Proposal for a Directive on Market Access to Port Services” (Port Package I), dockers had been the most discontented stakeholders (Pallis and Tsiotsis 2006). In the campaign against Port Package I, they established a collective action network, the International Dockworkers’ Council, to better link the ITF and national dockers’ unions. During the first phase of the campaign, the ETF determined that the national unions would lobby their European Parliament members (MEPs), while the ETF and ITF delegations collectively lobbied the European Commission (van Assche and Deschouwer 2007). Though these lobbying efforts were unsuccessful in preventing the package from reaching a vote in the European Commission, they were successful in securing several amendments.
In the second phase of the campaign, dockers implemented Europe-wide protests. In anticipation of a second reading of the package in the European Parliament in January 2003, the ETF worked with national unions to organize symbolic stoppages and twenty-four-hour strikes in Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Finland, Poland, Cyprus, Malta, the United Kingdom, and Sweden. During each of these protests, the only stated objective of the ETF and national union participants was to stop Port Package I (van Assche and Deschouwer 2007). When Port Package I was in fact rejected later that same year, many cited the ETF as one of the main contributors to public pressure to rebuff it. What is most surprising about these successes is that dockers are the only ETF group with no institutionally recognized social dialogue with the European Commission (ETF 2011). 10
The successful fight against Port Package I invigorated the dockers for a second battle a year later when Port Package II was introduced (ETF 2011). This time their message was more sophisticated. Pallis and Tsiotsis (2006, 27) suggest that, during this second campaign, the “dynamic demonstrations” by ETF dockers strongly influenced public opinion and their concerns were “heard and felt” by the MEPs. Throughout, an estimated 40,000 people protested in twelve countries. The strategy culminated in a rally in close proximity to the European Parliament building just days before the package was voted on.
As part of their campaign, the dockers specifically criticized the mandatory requirement for port authorities to implement new commercial handling services, suggesting instead that additional services should be optional. In addition, they declared that self-handling violated the International Labor Organization’s Decision 137 on safety and social grounds (thus appealing to more than just dockers’ unions through their claim). Finally, they argued that further criteria for potential service providers should be introduced beyond simply low pay, which might come at the risk of quality and safety. In terms of the drafting process, the ETF claimed that Port Package II was without merit as it had been drafted “without any proper consultation with the industry” (ETF 2011, para. 1). The result of the dockers’ opposition was that, within a few days, the European Commission had rejected Port Package II by an overwhelming majority. In response, the ETF commended the Commission for having “given up the dogmatic approach” and for promoting “a broad dialogue with port stakeholders” (ETF 2007b, para. 1). Furthermore, it stated that it welcomed “the shift in the policy focus, moving from the liberalization of port services to a holistic framework for the sector,” but that it also remained adamant that it would continue to campaign against liberalizing reforms that it considered harmful (para. 2).
Whereas dockers were able to stop the Port I and Port II packages, seafarers have been less successful in their struggle against CTP deregulation. Indeed, deregulation has been a significant issue in the European shipping industry as more EU ships register under non-EU flags and hire non-EU crews. Despite early indications that it might move to protect standards through its 1998 COM(1998)251 staffing directive, which would subject non-EU ships to the same terms and conditions of employment and health and safety standards as EU ships, in fact the European Commission has done little to prevent the growing trend of shippers using OR/FOC. Certainly, soon after the directive’s issuance the ETF began to petition members of the European Commission and Parliament to support it. Thus, seafarers engaged in intense lobbying of the European Parliament through a massive campaign to promote employment for EU maritime workers, using the motto of “more and better jobs at sea.” Equally, concerns about the content of the directive were transmitted to the European Commission through a Sectoral Social Dialogue Committee on maritime transport, a committee intended as a central body for “consultation, joint initiatives and negotiation” between the European Commission and interested stakeholders (European Union 2011a).
Seafarers, however, faced an intense lobbying campaign launched in opposition to the directive, one led by the European Community Shipowners’ Association. Indeed, one report suggests that “despite the favourable opinion of the European parliament and the European Economic and Social Committee,” it was the pressure from the shipowners that resulted in the directive’s subsequent withdrawal in 2004 (European Community Shipowners’ Association 2005). In response to this withdrawal the ETF “strongly condem[ned] European shipowners’ lack of commitment to protecting employment” and further noted that
this failure showed clearly that management at the European level was ultimately denying EU maritime workers a chance to remain competitive by ensuring that access to the intra-European scheduled ferry trades would be based on the lowest possible social standards and drastic cuts in labour costs. (ETF 2010a, 8)
Nevertheless, between 2004 and 2009 there was little progress on the issue, with negotiations between the ETF and shipowners deadlocked.
Discussion
As detailed in the first section of this article, the geographical contexts within which workers find themselves can have significant impacts on their political and economic behavior. Workers must be aware of the unevenly developed geography of capitalism and respond effectively to these developments when organizing. Although both seafarers and dockers have been affected by the liberalization of the European Union’s Common Transport Policy, the dockers have been more successful in organizing in response than have the seafarers. Below we argue that there are two key geographical factors that have played a role in the dockers’ success. The first of these relates to the geographical nature of capital, while the second relates to the geographical nature of labor.
With regard to the first issue, we would suggest that dockers have been able to use their employers’ geographical immobility, manifested through the spatial embeddedness of the latter’s capital investments in ports, against them when organizing. As previously mentioned, in Europe and around the world there has been a significant increase in the privatization of ports in recent years. Thus, as the landlord model of port organization has spread in Europe, private companies not only have become increasingly responsible for providing technical and navigational services and cargo handling but also have begun to invest in superstructure and equipment. These types of investments (building terminals, facilities, and warehouses and purchasing large cranes and forklifts) are generally geographically immobile (with large cranes and forklifts considered less fixed than terminals, facilities, and warehouses). Consequently, once private companies devote resources to more fixed investments it becomes more difficult for them to move their operations to another port. To adopt Albert Hirschman’s (1970, 33-34) terminology, private companies find that they have less opportunity to “exit” a given port and thus they become increasingly more likely to use their “voice.” Put another way, the geographical fixity of their investments means that they do not really have the option of fleeing particular places (“exiting”), and thus must negotiate with the dockers in their particular ports over conditions of work if they hope to secure profits (using their “voice”). As private capital has increasingly fixed itself in place by purchasing port facilities, thereby accumulating significant sunk costs, then dockers, we would argue, have been presented with more opportunities to bargain successfully for certain salaries and working conditions because their employers cannot simply afford to pick up and leave and/or they choose not to walk away from millions of dollars of investment. This phenomenon—not walking away from sunk costs—is what organizational psychologists Arkes and Blumer (1985, 124) have called the “sunk cost effect,” and it is manifested, they argue, “in a greater tendency to continue an endeavor once an investment in money, effort, or time has been made.”
By way of contrast, capital investments in the shipping industry (i.e., ships and the necessary equipment onboard) tend to be mobile, both geographically and sectorally. If a particular ship or its equipment proves unprofitable for a shipping line, these investments can be more readily replaced because they are, generally, less expensive in the first place than is port infrastructure and because there is an active market for them for scrap. 11 Moreover, if a particular shipping route is no longer profitable, the shipping line may be able to switch to a new, more profitable route. In both cases the shipping line is able to shift its capital from one investment to another and one location to another more easily and does not face the issue of having considerable sunk costs in particular geographical locations in quite the way that dockers’ employers do. 12 In such circumstances, we would suggest, seafarers will typically have less opportunity to bargain successfully as, when “exit” is an available option for capital, “voice” is generally less likely to be chosen.
The differential mobility of dockers and seafarers, though, also plays a role in their differential success, we want to suggest. In particular, dockers are able to better use geography to their advantage than are seafarers because of the inherent spatial embeddedness of their work and of themselves. As already noted, workers must navigate two identities—their class identity, as shaped by their relationship to the means of production, and their geopolitical identity, as shaped by their relationship to particular places and the rights this relationship warrants them. The dockers successfully deployed both identities. For example, dockers appealed to class-based organizing when they declared that self-handling violated the International Labor Organization’s Decision 137 on safety and social grounds. In this way, they extended their struggle beyond ports and garnered support from nondockers. Moreover, they were able to draw upon their communities’ habitus and the construction of port communities as particular spaces—spaces in which workers often socialize in community institutions (bars, churches, public spaces) beyond the workplace.
The fact that dockers are fixed in space, are from the same communities, and so are socialized in similar ways, we would aver, means that they have had opportunities to develop the kinds of formal and informal networks emerging out of their communities’ habitus that can encourage solidarity and common action. Thus, in response to both port packages the dockers implemented Europe-wide protests in ports (they organized symbolic stoppages and twenty-four-hour strikes) and in the streets (in close proximity to the European Parliament building). These protests were visible representations of their place—both metaphorical and material—within the larger European community, gestures that firmly identified them as European citizens to the larger public and assisted in endearing the public to the dockers’ cause. In addition, because the landlord model of port organization has had the effect of reducing ports’ “local character” as large, Europe-wide operators have come to dominate the industry, dockers across Europe have increasingly come to have the same employers. 13 This made it easier for them to build a Europe-wide scale of resistance to the port packages. Facing many of the same employers, dockers could use the growing erasure of geographical differences in ownership in different ports to their advantage, using the rhetoric that dockers across the EU were fighting the same fight against the same set of employers. The key to their success, then, was their multilayered collective action approach and ability to move from the national level to the supranational level of action, through which they encouraged the strong national dockers’ unions to lobby their MEPs and the ETF, the ITF, and the International Dockworkers’ Council to collectively lobby the European Commission (van Assche and Deschouwer 2007).
Seafarers, on the other hand, are, by nature, itinerant workers. Not only is their place of work (a ship) by definition physically mobile, but they are often from myriad different communities (typically in the Global South) and so may share little in common. In many cases, the first time they will have met one another will have been when they boarded their ship at the beginning of its journey. Consequently, unless they are from the same communities in countries like the Philippines, they are unlikely to have had the kinds of informal social interactions that come from being in close geographic proximity to each other in their communities of residence and on which strong ties of solidarity are built. In this regard they are almost the exact opposite of dockers, where sons often follow their fathers onto the docks in the same port. Not only, then, are they less likely to have grown up together, but the fact that they are usually working thousands of miles from their home communities means they do not have the kinds of community resources on hand on which they can draw to sustain themselves through what may be long disputes with their employers—in other words, they have no collective habitus.
Furthermore, though these workers are employed by EU shipping lines, they are most often not EU citizens. Though little data exist as to the number of EU versus non-EU seafarers on ships registered under an EU flag, a 2010 study of the intra-EU shipping industry showed that for those countries of Western Europe where the data are available (i.e., Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom), 79 percent of the seafarers were non-EU citizens (European Commission 2011, 21). The fact that such crews consist mostly of non-EU citizens means that they can be excluded from the territorial spaces of the European Union should they become too militant in ways that dockers cannot. Certainly, we do not want to claim that these are insurmountable factors, and it is entirely possible for seafarers to develop strong ties of solidarity and to challenge their employers. For instance, in 2003 an agreement between the ITF and two employers’ associations (the International Maritime Employers’ Committee and the International Mariners’ Management Association of Japan) resulted in a pattern agreement for pay and conditions that covered some fifty thousand seafarers working on about two thousand FOC ships (Lillie 2006, 39). But we do want to argue that, in direct contrast to dockers, the spatial context of seafarers’ lives and their lack of political representation within the European Union can make it more difficult for them to develop the kinds of actions and networks that might successfully challenge the EU’s liberalization policies.
Such geopolitical considerations, we suggest, may also have shaped how the two groups of workers have interacted with the broader EU. Specifically, the seafarers had formal representation in the European Sectoral Social Dialogue Committee (to the European Commission) and yet failed to effectively change the Commission’s decision, whereas the dockers had no formal representation to the Commission but managed to campaign effectively against two liberalizing reform packages. At first glance, this perhaps seems paradoxical. However, it may be that formal representation was prized more highly by the seafarers precisely because of their lack of formal EU citizenship and their informal connections to Europe (e.g., no sense of common place, culture, or language)—that is, the nature of seafaring allowed little opportunity to create a connection between seafarers and the larger European community built on common geopolitical interests and identities. As a result, the seafarer campaigns were not launched in the streets and did not garner much public attention within Europe. Instead, these workers followed formal channels of communicating with those responsible for European transport policy and concentrated on their class-based interests against the European shipowners. In the end, though, with the seafarers devoid of public support, the shipowners’ interests and power were more effective in influencing the Commission’s decisions.
Until this point, we have presented a rather bleak description of European seafarers’ efforts to organize against the EU’s CTP’s liberalization. In their latest campaign, however, seafarers and dockers have begun to work in collaboration. As one ITF spokesperson explains, this is a natural symbiosis:
[S]eafarers are increasingly being asked to lash or unlash cargo.
14
And employers are becoming more and more inventive in avoiding potential “interference” from dockers’ unions. . . . For this job, seafarers are paid peanuts—if they get any extra pay at all. Every time they do it they jeopardise their health and risk their life for the benefit and profit of the ones above them. Not to mention the stress and fatigue this extra non-seafaring work brings them. At the same time, dockers are losing work. Both seafarers and dockers are losing out. (ITF 2010)
Consequently, at a September 2010 ETF conference for dockers and seafarers in Kingston upon Hull, United Kingdom, members of both groups agreed to launch a joint campaign: Fair and Safe Ferries for All (ETF 2010b). Ferries were chosen as the focus of this campaign because the European Commission’s emphasis on short-distance sea shipping has led to unequal working and pay conditions and the use of seafarers to carry out dock handling services to reduce in-port costs. The strategy of this campaign is twofold.
First, the ETF began developing a policy paper in 2010 for submission to the European Commission articulating two phases of reform (ETF 2010a). The initial phase would require all crews employed on ferries trading between EU countries to be covered by conditions of employment that are on a par with, or superior to, those applicable in the countries concerned (i.e., it would cover the country of the ship’s origin and the country where the shipping is being done). The next phase would require a uniform set of regulations that are applicable throughout the European Union (ETF 2010b). Second, the ETF has launched visible protests in ports throughout Europe. For example, in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, ETF members and national unions have encouraged crews, passengers, and vessel owners on passenger and cargo ferries to join in their campaign efforts. For their part, in October 2010 Dutch campaign participants held meetings with crew and passengers onboard ferry vessels, outside ferry company offices, and in terminals. There have been subsequent plans for more protests throughout Europe.
It is as yet unclear whether such a collaboration will serve to enhance the effectiveness of one or both groups. That said, there are reasons to believe that collaboration between the two groups may be beneficial. Most notably, it seems that it is better to launch a campaign based on both geographical and class-based interests rather than simply one or the other. By joining forces, the two groups may be able to benefit from each other’s strategic focus. As Lillie (2005, 88) has put it, “Seafaring unions [can] draw on the industrial leverage of port workers to negotiate minimum standard pay agreements, while dock unions [can] leverage the growing influence of the ITF in fighting union busting in ports.” Thus, including dockers in a campaign may give seafarers the kinds of connections to particular geographic places that they need to further their bargaining. The visible Fair and Safe Ferries for All protests in ports throughout Europe, for instance, have undoubtedly helped non-EU seafarers gain the European public’s attention. By aligning their efforts with European dockers, the seafarers may come to be viewed as members of the larger European community. In doing so, they may gain the public attention they need to place political pressure on EU representatives to halt further liberalizing reforms. Collaboration, however, may also serve to benefit dockers. Whereas dockers have been successful so far in thwarting two port packages, the trend toward liberalization will likely continue. If dockers and seafarers can bargain collectively against port operators and shipping lines for their class-based interests and yet draw on strong place-based support networks, they may succeed in providing a robust bulwark against further deregulation.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.