The Place-based Work of Global Circulation: Maritime Workers, Collaboration, and Labor Agency at the Seaport

Abstract

How does place influence the work of global circulation, and how might that work enroll hitherto overlooked modes of collaboration, power, and agency? Geographers recentering labor in analyses of global production and circulation emphasize the labor–capital relation and employer control versus employee resistance. This can limit empirical and political prospects. Instead, we foreground two additional relationships: collaborative relationships of trust between workers across roles and organizations who coordinate circulation together; and relations between workers and place that unfold as tasks are completed amid challenging oceanic and climatic forces. Such relationships are forged by the need to collaborate and provide the foundation for transverse exercises of labor agency. To illustrate, we take to the water with maritime workers (marine pilots, tugboat operators, and liners), observing how shipping circulation is maintained. Seaports are idiosyncratic places—gateways and chokepoints for global circulation experiencing oceanic and atmospheric extremes. Coordination problems are pervasive. Disruption risks require maritime workers to collaborate in place to ensure circulation occurs through place. Demonstrating how the ocean's lateral forces mediate circulation, we emphasize three features of an on-water, place-based labor process: (1) choreographed coordination, (2) situational awareness, and (3) combined multidimensional skills. Navigating a labor process conditioned by the sea, port workers collaborate to manage risks and maintain circulation. In so doing, they also preside over risk and circulation. We argue for collaborative relationships and transverse expressions of agency to feature more prominently in analyses of the diverse, place-based, and interconnected labor upon which capitalist circulation depends.

Key words:

• maritime workers
• labor agency
• transverse power
• seaports
• shipping
• circulation
• skills
• critical logistics
• disruption risks

Acknowledgments

Thanks to our colleagues Chantel Carr, Lucy Taksa, and Mallee Smith, the four anonymous referees, and editor Jim Murphy for their constructive feedback on versions of this article. Thanks also to the maritime workers who gave their time to participate and support the research. Funding was provided by Australian Research Council Grants DP200100633 and DE180100492.

Notes

1 Following Jonas (1996, 325), economic geographers theorize labor control as the “historically contingent and territorially embedded set of mechanisms which coordinate the time-space reciprocities between production, work, consumption and labor reproduction.” Workers may resist control through political actions spanning formal, union-led campaigns to more subtle acts of reducing labor effort in work spaces (Carmichael and Herod 2012; Joyce 2020).

2 We acknowledge feminist critiques around what constitutes labor and worker-centered analyses of the capitalist space economy (McDowell 2015; Strauss 2020). In this article, our concern is with workers’ lived experiences of waged labor (Perrons 1986), though we are cognizant of the domestic, social, and community dimensions that inform those experiences outside the hours and places of waged work.

3 Economic geographers have also long studied ports (see Seeman 1935; Miller 1937). Intriguingly, our case study, Port Kembla, was the focus of Britton’s (1962) analysis in this journal sixty years earlier.

4 Clarification is warranted between labor process analysis and its workplace-focused tradition, and labor market studies that focus on the dynamics of capitalist restructuring. The concept of labor regimes has reemerged to help explore the multiscalar power dynamics inherent to the capital–labor relationship, including the brokering role of the state and matters of social reproduction that regulate the supply of skilled labor power (Mezzadri 2021; Baglioni et al. 2022). The concept of labor regimes is viewed as a middle ground but maintains a focus on antagonism and conflict. Labor regime analysis seeks to reject privileging any single site within a global production system. Hence, Baglioni et al. (2022) define labor regimes as a societal framework whereby labor (broadly defined) is central to how we understand and approach the capitalist space economy. Because labor regimes research is still mostly about labor–capital conflict, our assessment of the limits to labor geography analyses of agency equally applies.

5 Comparative research is also needed on the flipside of worker-centered transverse modes of power and the management of risk, for example, where systems fail or collapse (in finance and banking, and emergency and essential services). These may be a failure of management investing in, and entrusting, workforces to collaborate in mitigating risk. Our framework would be equally relevant in such circumstances.