Paper short abstract:

This paper follows transformations of labor dependencies in the port of Piraeus, Greece. I will argue that paradoxically, the integration of the port into the global supply chain market unleashed neighborhood-level dynamics between local subcontractors and dockworkers seeking employment

Paper long abstract:

Amidst various negotiation phases during the last decade, the formerly state-owned port of Piraeus, Greece, was finally sold to the Chinese terminal operator COSCO, integrating thus Piraeus into the global supply chain market. Following the global trend around the restructuring of labor regimes in logistics, the new era brought radical changes in labor organization and relations in the container piers of the port. While labor was traditionally controlled through a complex system of interdependency between trade unions, political parties and the state, often framed in clientistic politics, the privatization and the new precarious regimes crystallized a system of outsourced management controlled by various local subcontractors who are most of the time in minimum or nonexistent communication with the actual Chinese owners. For various agents such as trade unions, academics and activists, the concession signifies the shift from state control to “foreign interests”, by turning the port into a Chinese enclave in isolation from Greek reality. However, I will argue that paradoxically, the “globalization” of Piraeus shifted the level of dependencies from the abstract realm of the state and the parties, to the deep neighborhood level and face to face knowledge. Since the subcontractors are mostly locals, with particular family names and histories in the Piraeutic neighborhoods, ethnography reveals that employment in times of crisis requires particular relations, behaviors and reciprocities that exceed the work space and sprawled across the everyday life and geographies of Piraeus ,reconfiguring local identities and political loyalties.