Counter-logistics in Po valley region

Niccolò Cuppini

Chapter 48 in Handbook of Research on the Global Political Economy of Work, 2023, pp 570-579 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: A logistical lexicon and imaginary are shaping the very ways in which we are accustomed to think about contemporary capitalism. Logistics is then rapidly emerging as a crucial systemic logic, as a set of necessary infrastructures and assemblages of labour force for capital reproduction, and as a site of contestation and struggles. In the last decade the Po valley region (Northern Italy) has become an interesting laboratory of logistical forces. On one hand, huge infrastructural investments and the process of mergers of multi-utilities in the services and energy sectors has taken place, determining concentrations of capital that attract each other according to the logic of the vast area regardless of administrative borders. On the other hand, the Po valley region is an epicentre of strikes and workers’ struggles investing this Italian supply chain. Logistics thus becomes central to understanding emerging social configurations as well as their implied technologies and labour regimes. The chapter presents a theoretical framework and deepens the Northern Italy case study, discussing some relevant characteristics: the racialised labour regimes; the extensive use of the cooperatives as a tool for employing and organising labour; the factors that made possible the cycle of struggles from the point of view of the organisation of the labour force: the positionality and the concentration. Finally, this logistics sector is presented as an apparently classic Fordist-type industrial workforce, but on the advanced level of capitalist development and how blocking goods at the gates and striking against the companies define complex forms of initiative capable of delineating a counter-logistics designing the coordinates of new assemblages of territoriality and its social composition.

Keywords: Business and Management; Development Studies; Economics and Finance; Politics and Public Policy Sociology and Social Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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