In Getting the Goods, Edna Bonacich and Jake B. Wilson focus on the Southern California ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach—which together receive 40 percent of the nearly $2 trillion worth of goods imported annually to the United States—to examine the impact of the logistics revolution on workers in transportation and distribution. Built around the invention of shipping containers and communications technology, the logistics revolution has enabled giant retailers like Wal-Mart and Target to sell cheap consumer products made using low-wage labor in developing countries. The goods are shipped through an efficient, low-cost, intermodal freight system, in which containers are moved from factories in Asia to distribution centers across the United States without ever being opened. Bonacich and Wilson follow the flow of imports from Asian factories, exploring the roles of importers, container shipping companies, the ports, railroad and trucking companies, and warehouses. At each stage, Getting the Goods raises important questions about how the logistics revolution affects logistics workers. Drawing extensively on interviews with workers and managers at all levels of the supply chain, on industry reports, and on economic data, Bonacich and Wilson find that, in general, conditions have deteriorated for workers. But they also discover that changes in the system of production and distribution provide new strategic opportunities for labor to gain power. A much-needed corrective to both uncritical celebrations of containerization and the global economy and pessimistic predictions about the future of the U.S. labor movement, Getting the Goods will become required reading for scholars and students in sociology, political economy, and labor studies.
In Getting the Goods, Edna Bonacich and Jake B. Wilson focus on the Southern California ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach—which together receive 40 percent of the nearly $2 trillion worth of goods imported annually to the United States—to examine the impact of the logistics revolution on workers in transportation and distribution. Built around the invention of shipping containers and communications technology, the logistics revolution has enabled giant retailers like Wal-Mart and Target to sell cheap consumer products made using low-wage labor in developing countries. The goods are shipped through an efficient, low-cost, intermodal freight system, in which containers are moved from factories in Asia to distribution centers across the United States without ever being opened. Bonacich and Wilson follow the flow of imports from Asian factories, exploring the roles of importers, container shipping companies, the ports, railroad and trucking companies, and warehouses. At each stage, Getting the Goods raises important questions about how the logistics revolution affects logistics workers. Drawing extensively on interviews with workers and managers at all levels of the supply chain, on industry reports, and on economic data, Bonacich and Wilson find that, in general, conditions have deteriorated for workers. But they also discover that changes in the system of production and distribution provide new strategic opportunities for labor to gain power. A much-needed corrective to both uncritical celebrations of containerization and the global economy and pessimistic predictions about the future of the U.S. labor movement, Getting the Goods will become required reading for scholars and students in sociology, political economy, and labor studies.
The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) remains one of the best examples of a labor union that traces its origins to radical anti-racist principles. Today, very few mainstream unions remain that were founded on militant, radical, and “anti-racist” principles. The ILWU remains the strongest port union in the United States, and its members are among the highest paid blue-collar union workers in the world. Drawing on in-depth interviews, archival oral histories research, and ethnographic observation, Solidarity Forever? highlights the struggle of a key group of Black and women leaders who fought for racial and gender equality in the ports of Southern California. The book argues that institutional and cultural forms of racial and gender inequality are embedded within US trade union locals leading to the following deleterious consequences for unions: (1) a proliferation of internal discrimination lawsuits within unions, which can cost the union International, or union local, potentially millions of dollars in legal fees and financial settlements thereby redistributing precious financial resources that could be spent on key activities related to making unions stronger from outside attacks; (2) an erosion of trust and solidarity among workers, the key values of any successful union, which ultimately undermines the radical democratic potential of unions and rank-and-file participation in union politics; and (3) the undermining of workers of color and women workers as full and equal participants in the labor movement. The future of organized labor in the United States could very well be determined by the ability of the labor movement, and labor unions in particular, to listen to those workers who have been relegated to the margins of the global economy—workers of color, immigrant workers, women workers, and all workers in the Global South.
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