Precarious in Piraeus: on the making of labour insecurity in a port concession

ABSTRACT

Examining the territorial and logistical factors surrounding the leasing of the Greek port of Piraeus to a subsidiary of the Chinese state-owned enterprise COSCO, this paper responds to calls to investigate variations in experiences of precarity. The article is based on research conducted in 2014 when the container processing area at Piraeus was divided between two terminals: the first run by the Piraeus Port Authority (OLP) and the second run by COSCO’s subsidiary Piraeus Container Terminals (PCT). By contrasting the threatened unionized labour regime at OLP with the highly precarious labour conditions at PCT, the paper asks how the operative dimensions of capital condition precarity’s intensification and spread. In this light, precarity emerges not simply as a form of labour insecurity or an unevenly shared condition of human vulnerability but as a relational nexus that links questions of political economy to matters of subjectivity, space, power, and governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Precarity
• labour
• logistics
• territory
• software
• infrastructure

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Brett Neilson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6958-9656

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [DP130103720].

Notes on contributors

Brett Neilson

Brett Neilson is Research Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. With Sandro Mezzadra, he is the author of Border as method, or, the multiplication of labor (Duke University Press, 2013) and The politics of operations: Excavating contemporary capitalism (Duke University Press, in press). With Ned Rossiter, he coordinated the projects Transit labour: Circuits, regions, borders and Logistical worlds: Infrastructure, software, labour. With Ned Rossiter and Tanya Notley, he is currently running the project Data farms: Labour, territory, circuits.