Logistical Chokepoints, Precarious Work, and Social Reproduction: Labour Conflicts and the Metabolic Rift in Ports and Airports in Brazil and Portugal

Abstract

Sitting at pivotal points of globalized economies, workers in logistical chokepoints such as ports and airports should have a lot of negotiating power. Examining the spatial-historical narrative of logistics in Portugal and Brazil, this book asks why working conditions in ports and airports are still predominantly precarious. Using her own field research and qualitative studies, the author analyses the work and lives of workers along materialist theoretical approaches to social reproduction, the metabolic rift, the state and the body. Based on these studies, she is able to point out that precarious working conditions at transportation hubs not only include low wages and fixed-term contracts. Above all the working conditions are charaterised by problems in the area of health and safety at work. The author turns to theories of social reproduction (SRT) to understand the working body as a structure and actor in the metabolism or metabolism between production and reproduction. She asks how the restructuring of labour at chokepoints throughout history affects the metabolism of social reproduction and the struggles of workers through surveillance, regulation, laws and ordinances. In a first step, the author examines the role of global logistics in the emergence of capitalism from a Marxist perspective and explores the question of why chokepoints have emerged historically. In a second step, she analyses working conditions along race, gender and precarity by developing the concepts of gendered, racialized and precarious patterns of exploitation and situating the history of workers within these analyses.In a third step, the author integrates a materialist/Poulantzasian theory of the state into the work to interpret the role of different state apparatuses in regulating and influencing the metabolism of social reproduction of workers at chokepoints. These analyses are underpinned and delimited by the different struggles of workers at Brazilian and Portuguese chokepoints at national and international levels.