Digitalized Ports, Racialized Labor: Shifting Infrastructures for Work in Container Shipping

Introduction

Container shipping has implications for everyone who has ever shopped in a store or online. Shipping is the backbone of the global economy. 90% of the world's goods travel by ship. The industry has a global reach and a highly diverse workforce. It is also structured by workers' nationalities, resulting in inequalities. Inequalities occur within ships, where some European workers systematically receive higher wages, and between regions, where labor conditions vary.

Current Changes in Shipping

Shipping is currently undergoing rapid change as it digitalizes its workflows. It is unknown if digitalization will help or hinder worker equality, or for which groups.

Potential Impacts of Technology

Technology can increase workers' skills and make travel safer and more efficient. Yet the benefits may only extend to some, while others face difficulties becoming skilled or lose their jobs altogether. Because pay and working conditions are structured by nationality, the digitalization of shipping will likely also affect labor's racialization, or how practices and ideas about race are constructed and employed, and related inequalities.

Project Aim

The aim of DIGIPORTS is to understand how and to what extent digitalization is reconfiguring the racialization of shipping labor.

Innovative Approach

This project innovatively combines critical logistics and algorithm studies. It provides a groundbreaking study of how the on-the-ground implementation of digital infrastructures is reconfiguring four processes of racialization:

1. Displacement
2. Classification
3. Potential for criminalization
4. Related precarity of work

Significance of DIGIPORTS

DIGIPORTS is the first ethnographic study of the digitalization of shipping.

Expected Contributions

It will provide an integrated analysis of how digitalization is reshaping labor and racial inequalities, develop a four-part framework for studying racialization as sets of institutionalized practices that extend across space and time, and lay the groundwork for a new interdisciplinary field: digital logistics studies.