McClelland, M. (2012). I was a warehouse wage slave.



Draying and Picking: Precarious Labor in the Logistics Supply ChainDavid JaffeeDepartment of Sociology and AnthropologyUniversity of North Floridadjaffee@unf.eduPaper prepared for presentation at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, August, 2014.Do not quote or cite without permission of author.Acknowledgement: The author would like to than David Bensman for his helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of the paper.Revised draft, August 2014.ABSTRACTRecent research on labor market conditions and dynamics in the United States point to a rise in “precarious work”. It tends to be characterized by low wages, unstable work arrangements, temporary employment relationships, underemployment, economic insecurity, and an absence of employer provided benefits. As the United States, under neo-liberalism, has restructured the organization of economic production nationally and globally, certain sectors have expanded and reconfigured employment relationships. One of these is transportation and logistics, functioning to move and distribute the goods now produced abroad into US consumer markets. This paper highlights two industries in this sector – drayage trucking and warehouse/distribution centers (W/DCs) – and the conditions that have contributed to the expansion of precarious work. The paper concludes with an overview of recent labor actions taken to improve conditions for workers in this sector. “Yesterday's manufacturing jobs are today's logistics jobs”. North Carolina State Ports AuthorityA great deal has been written over the past decade about the growth of insecure low paying jobs (Kalleberg, 2011; Kalleberg, 2009; Autor, Katz, and Kearney, 2006) with the terms “precarious ” and the “precariat” (Standing, 2012) now widely used to describe the labor market experiences of a growing number of workers in the United States. These trends have contributed to the rising inequality of income and, since the great financial slump, the number of such workers with insecure employment relations appears to be increasing (National Employment Law Project, 2012). This paper places this development in the larger context of the globalization of production, the restructuring of corporate organization, and the expansion of the transportation and logistics sector in the US economy. Increasingly, an understanding of local and national socio-economic conditions must be linked to larger international and global forces (Dicken 1998). The global chain/network literature has contributed to this understanding over the past two decades. Much of the focus has been on the shift in manufacturing to offshore and more profitable locations, and the dispersion of production activities taking place in less developed nations. The one part of the chain or network that has received insufficient attention is the transportation and logistics segment (see Bonacich and Wilson, 2008 for a notable exception). This element of the chain has becomes increasingly important as the distance among the segments of the chain has increased. Logistics and supply-chain management is now a dominant focus of corporate strategy and cost containment. In addition, logistics activities – goods movement -- have grown in importance in relation to goods-production within the United States. Today states, regions, and cities in the US are competing with each other for the privilege of becoming logistics nodes, hubs, or clusters (Sheffi, 2012). This paper looks at the labor market conditions in this segment of the value chain – transportation and logistics -- in the context of these larger socio-economic changes and conditions. The focus is on these activities as they are carried out and organized in the United States. More specifically, the analysis will examine two sectors of the “port logistics cluster” – drayage trucking and warehouse/distribution centers (W/DC) and the conditions of work for drayage drivers and W/DC material handlers (often referred to as “pickers”). A series of questions will be examined. First, what factors have contributed to the growing prominence of the transportation and logistics sector of the U.S. economy? Second, how do the different organizations involved in the logistics segment of the supply chain organize work and contribute to precarious work? Third, what actions have been taken and are being proposed to address the precarious work problem in this sector of the economy?The first section of the paper will link the growth of transportation and logistics and the associated labor conditions with the larger force of globalization and economic restructuring. The second section will describe the relevant organizational characteristics that contribute to particular employment relations in this sector and highlight features of the working conditions in drayage and W/DCs that reflect the exiting and growing precariousness. The final section will report on some recent labor actions and policy proposals designed to counter the precarious tendencies in these sectors.GLOBALIZATION AND THE LOGISTICS REVOLUTIONThe process of globalization has given rise to the geographic dispersion of production processes and the growing separation of the point of production from both the points of product development and product consumption (Dicken, 1998). As a result, the study of production processes and interorganizational relations among interdependent entities has been conceptualized through commodity chains (Gereffi & Korzeniewicz, 1994), global production networks (Coe, Dicken, & Hesse, 2008) or global value chains (Gereffi, Humphrey and Sturgeon 2005). Each of these concepts is meant to capture the globalized and geographically dispersed phases and sequentially interdependent segments of product development, production, and consumption and the relative economic value and power of the participating activities and parties. Here we would like to emphasize the increasing importance of the transportation, distribution, and logistics segment of the global chains (Hesse and Rodrigue, 2006; Coe, 2014) and their labor market implications (Bensman, 2008). Global value chains (GVC) are “the full range of activities which are required to bring a product or service from conception, through the different phases of production (involving a combination of physical transformation and the input of various producer services), delivery to final consumers, and final disposal after use” (Kaplinsky & Morris, 2001). The GVC is often viewed as a sequence of activities ranging from research and development to design to production to logistics to marketing (Gereffi, Humphrey and Sturgeon 2005). Logistics is included as a relatively higher value activity in relation to production but of lower value than research and development, or marketing. It is also recognized as an indispensability and necessary condition for the entire value chain enterprise. In this sense logistics operations connect the links in the chain from the point of production to the point of consumption. For the retail sector this has been facilitated by the containerization of cargo (Levinson, 2006) and the associated intermodal system of transportation by truck, rail and container vessels. Under the globalization project and neo-liberal regime, economic development strategies increasingly revolve around insertion into the extended and far-flung chains of production and intermodal transportation and distribution. Most of the attention has been devoted to the geographic dispersion of economic activities that involve the cost-effective provision of raw materials and primary products, inputs and components, and assembly and manufacturing contributing to the production of a single commodity. Equally critical is the movement of the commodity to the final point of consumption and profit realization. This entails using intermodal logistics to move the goods through maritime container ports that serve as the gateways into national markets (Bonacich and Wilson, 2008; Rodrigue, Comtois, & Slack 2009). It is no coincidence that as production has been spatially reorganized there has been growing attention to transportation and distribution. In the business literature, these processes are conceptualized as supply-chain management, logistics, and intermodalism. A supply chain is defined as “a set of three or more entities…directly involved in the upstream and downstream flows of products, service, finances, and/or information from a source to a customer.” (Mentzer, DeWitt, Keebler, Min, Nix, Smith, & Zacharia, 2001, p. 4). The same authors define supply chain management as “the systemic, strategic coordination of the traditional business functions and tactics across these business functions within a particular company and across businesses within the supply chain, for the purposes of improving the long-term performance of the individual companies and the supply chain as a whole” (p. 18). Logistics is considered one aspect of supply chain management and is concerned with the planning and management of the movement and distribution of materials through the supply chain. Intermodalism refers to the movement of goods or materials using integrated but different modes of transportation. The shipping container is a technology that has enhanced and facilitated the intermodal transport of goods due to its standard size and the existence of common handling equipment. Thus, in a supply chain, a container holding finished or semi-finished cargo can be transported by and transferred between container ship, truck chassis, and/or rail car.In the retail or “buyer-driven” commodity/value chain along which the shipping containers are transported, Walmart stands out as the proto-type by setting the standard for supply chain efficiency and cost effectiveness. Walmart-style retail supply chains squeeze costs out of production, transportation and logistics thus impacting workers across a range of occupations (Appelbaum and Lichtenstein 2006; Lichtenstein 2010). Competition among retailers for everyday low prices rests significantly on the costs incurred between the point of production and the point of consumption along the supply chain, and the ability to keep transportation and distribution costs as low as possible so that they do not nullify the labor cost advantage of offshoring. This places downward pressure on costs, and intense competition among the logistics providers to retain contracts with the largest retailers. The net result plays out in the externalization of costs reflected in the working conditions, arrangements, and compensation of logistics workers.Cities and regions are now competing with each other, and attempting to leverage their geographic location, in order to establish “logistics clusters” that can capture the goods-moving activities that can potentially serve as engines of economic development. The advantages of these clusters have recently been trumpeted to include agglomeration effects that concentrate logistics businesses and service in geographic locations thus stimulating further investment and job growth through “positive feedback loops” (Sheffi, 2012). Promoting logistics as an economic strategy – particularly for port cities – has also involved advocating for massive coastal and transportation infrastructure projects funded from federal public and local sources. In order to convince the public of the wisdom of such “mega-projects” – which can exact a heavy cost in terms of environmental impacts and increasing noise and congestion -- there is the inevitable promise of jobs and expanded employment opportunities. Typically, this will include claims about the number of jobs supported and expanded by the port activities, but far less regarding the quality of employment. It is here where some analysis of the good jobs/bad jobs balance is warranted and sociologists can play a role in these community-based deliberations. ORGANIZATIONAL AND WORKING CONDITIONS IN DRAYAGE AND WAREHOUSE/DISTRIBUTION CENTERS (W/DC) This section considers the organizational characteristics and working conditions in the drayage and W/DC industries that make up the majority of employment opportunities in the logistics sector and contribute to precarious work. For the purposes of this analysis, precarious work is defined as work characterized by low wages, unstable work arrangements, temporary employment relationships, underemployment, economic insecurity, and an absence of employer provided benefits. While the purpose of this section is to describe current organizational and working conditions in the two sectors, it is important to situate this state of affairs in the context of broader trends in corporate restructuring. This entails both a spatial and structural component (Jaffee, 2001). On the spatial dimension, as indicated above, there has been a dispersion of economic activities based upon the calculation of advantages derived from geographic variations in labor costs and regulatory constraints. The strategic separation of the point of production from consumption is one element in this calculus. On the structural dimension, there has been a shift toward a more vertically disintegrated organizational form where the ownership of upstream and downstream enterprises is abandoned in the name of lean flexibility and core competencies. Lichtenstein (2014) chronicles this process as the historical movement from the visible hand of the vertically-integrated firm to the predominance of supply-chain relationships with a network of legally independent firms. He notes, significantly, that while the supply-chain is “composed of a disparate set of legally and organizationally autonomous ‘vendors’”, they are as “well controlled and as hierarchical as the most vertically integrated corporation of the old economy” (p. 13). Despite this control, there are no personnel, human resource management, or “other social, legal, and contractual obligations that have increasingly been attached to employer status since the New Deal” (Lichtenstein, 2014, p.15). Importantly, under this externalization arrangement, the lead firms have control and command over competing venders/suppliers, but no managerial responsibility or legal liability for the conditions of work. A further advantage of the organization outsourcing arrangement, identified by Weil in The Fissured Workplace (2014, p. 76-77), is based on a modification of the wage determination process. “Fissuring changes how gains are shared in a fundamental way: by shifting work out, lead firms no longer face a wage determination problem for that work but rather a pricing problem in selecting between companies vying for it. That change is critical because it results in fewer gains going to the workers who undertake those activities. It instead shifts those gains to investors.” This process reduces worker compensation in two ways. First, it eliminates the wage “demonstration effect” that results in efforts and negotiations by lower-paid workers to obtain levels of compensation provided to more highly skilled employees within the same firm or location. Second, with work outsourced to firms that are now competing with each other for the business of the lead company, there is a downward pressure on labor costs. We can now see how these organizational strategies have played out for workers in the port drayage and W/DC sectors of transportation and logistics. For drayage, this involves outsourcing to independent contractors; for W/DCs it involves outsourcing through several different firms. Port drayage In the retail dominated, or buyer-driven, commodity chain, consumer goods reach the US by large container vessels. The containers are unloaded at port container terminals and transferred to another transport mode for movement off the terminal and on to a W/DC facility or further transport mode (e.g. rail). The most common mode of short-haul container transport is by truck. This is known as “drayage”. Drayage entails the hauling of containers on a detachable trailer chassis. Drayage is an essential link in the intermodal movement of goods from container terminal to rail or W/DC and ultimately to the shelves of the retail sector. The drayage sector is characterized by a large number of logistics and trucking firms, many quite small, which contract with shippers for the movement of containers. Drivers in this sector may be employees of the firm, but more commonly are classified as “independent owner-operators”. Port drayage truck drivers represent a significant segment of the logistics labor force. The single best study and general treatment of the working conditions of truck drivers is Michael Belzer’s Sweatshop On Wheels. It is a story about the steady decline in labor market conditions revolving around the transition of trucking from the status of a protected and regulated, to unprotected and deregulated, industry with the passage of The Motor Carrier Act of 1980 (Belzer, 2000; Belman & Monaco, 2001; Bensman, 2009; Peoples & Talley, 2004). Prior to the 1980 Act, licensing requirements enforced by the Interstate Commerce Commission restricted the number of trucking firms and trucks. This had the effect of stabilizing prices and, with Teamster representation of drivers, providing truckers with attractive compensation and benefits. Rising wages and operating expenses were simply passed on in the form of higher shipping costs. The Motor Carrier Act radically altered the trucking landscape allowing the entry of low-cost, non-union trucking firms. The increasing number of players depressed trucker compensation and contributed to a steady decline in union representation. The drayage sector, in particular, has become highly competitive and fragmented and the net effect has been a decline in compensation levels and mass de-unionization (Belzer, 1995). While deregulation of trucking has negatively impacted working conditions for many truck drivers, it is the “drayers” who face the most severe circumstances. Prince (2005) describes the trucking labor force as internally stratified. At the top of the pyramid are the fulltime employees of the major national trucking firms who may also be unionized. Below this relatively privileged segment of the trucking labor force are the various owner-operators. Among owner operators there is also a hierarchy. “At the bottom of the pyramid are owner-operators hauling international containers – the fastest growing segment of intermodal traffic. After expenses, many of them make about $6 an hour, less than what many fast-food jobs pay” (Prince, 2005, p. 13). Or, as Bonacich notes, “Of all the global trade related logistics workers, port truckers are the most oppressed” (2003, p. 46).A major, and most significant, consequence of deregulation has been the rise of this “owner-operator” or “independent contractor” arrangement (Bensman, 2009, 2014). This represents the outsourcing model used by the drayage trucking sector. Under this now-dominant drayage industry standard, trucking firms -- rather than owning trucks and hiring workers as employees -- contract with “self-employed” drivers who own or lease their own truck. These drivers work for, but are not officially employed by, a single trucking company, and they are paid by the trip or load, instead of by the hour. The implication of being an independent owner-operator, as fictional as it might be in practice (Bensman, 2009, 2014), effectively frees trucking companies from any financial and legal obligations they would incur under an official employment relationship (e.g. social security, health benefits, retirement). Further, and quite significantly, as an “independent business” the owner operator is prohibited from joining with other owner-operators in organizing a labor union, as this would violate federal anti-trust laws. A number of studies have examined in greater detail the conditions of work for this segment of the logistics industry (Monaco & Grobar, 2004; Bensman & Bromberg, 2008; Harrison, Hutson, West, & Wilke, 2007; Port Jobs, 2007; East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, 2007; Jaffee & Rowley, 2009; Smith, Bensman, & Marvy, 2012; see also DePillis, 2014). Several patterns emerge. In the studies that asked drivers about their racial/ethnic status, we find that a solid majority of drivers in all cases occupy minority group status (for example Hispanic/Latino drivers made up 92% in LA/LB and 66% in NJ; in Jacksonville Florida African American and Hispanic/Latino combine to make up the majority). This signals the “racialization” of this particular segment of the trucking labor market in which ethnic and racial minority groups occupy and are concentrated in the least advantaged employment categories, and/or move into those occupational sectors that have experienced downward mobility in terms of compensation and working conditions (see Bonacich, Alimahomed & Wilson, 2008). Trucking generally, and port drayage in particular, is representative of this type of occupation. Consistent with the more general trends toward precariousness, the majority of drayage drivers in these studies are owner-operators – from 86% in Los Angeles/Long Beach to 68% in Jacksonville Florida. As noted, the owner-operators are essentially “dependent” contractors who are not allowed to work for more than one trucking firm, receive no employee benefits, are compensated by the trip rather than the hour, and absorb all costs associated with the operation of their vehicles as well as the inefficiency of the system. In terms of the latter, what are most significant are the routine but costly delays and bottlenecks (terminal security clearance, dependence on terminal operations to locate containers or provide roadworthy chassis, highway traffic). For owner-operators, who are paid by the trip rather than the hour, wait time is one of the most significant factors impacting compensation and also contributing to the extended hours of the workday. Overall, drayage owner-operators work in a labor market characterized by high turnover, comparatively longer working hours, lower earnings, the absence of health insurance and pension plans, poorer occupational safety outcomes, poorer standards and entitlements, and higher exposure to injuries, hazards, disease and psychological distress. The drivers are solely responsible for maintenance, repairs, fuel (the largest expense), road taxes, bobtail insurance, tolls, traffic fines, radio and/or telephone bills, truck leases and tax preparation (Port Jobs, 2007; East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, 2007; Smith, Bensman, & Marvy, 2012).ADDIN RW.CITE{{57 National Cooperative Freight Research Program 2011;71 Bensman, D 2009;47 Smith, R 2010;55 Jaffee, D. 2009}} The dependence on one firm contractually limits the amount of work available to cover costs of living and work-related expenses. In a 2009 study (Jaffee & Rowley, 2009), 98.1% of the owner-operators surveyed in Jacksonville indicated they were “not allowed to work for other firms”. ADDIN RW.CITE{{55 Jaffee, D. 2009}} Other studies have reported similar overwhelming majorities of drayage ‘independent contractor’ truck drivers who receive orders from a single trucking company that, under contract, requires the driver not be allowed to make deliveries for another company.ADDIN RW.CITE{{71 Bensman, D 2009}} Therefore, truckers are ‘misclassified’ as independent contractors (Bensman, 2014). While they are strictly regulated by corporate entities to benefit the firms production and economic advantage, they are considered ‘independent owner operators’ when it comes to benefits, worker rights, maintenance, and repairs. The misclassification of drivers as “independent contractors” can be verified if one applies the defining conditions for employee classification to their labor market status. As outlined by Bensman (2014), these conditions include “behavioral control”, “financial control”, and “type of relationship”. Behaviorally, the contracting firm determines what containers are moved when and where, so there is no independent autonomy or discretion. Financially, the drivers are paid a set price by the container, and have no independent ability to determine their level of compensation. Finally, in terms of the relationship to the contracting firm, drivers are only permitted to move containers for one trucking company, thus ensuring exclusivity. These three conditions establish an absolute clear-cut case of employee status and the misclassification as “independent contractor”. In addition to the economic consequences of the owner-operator arrangement, there are also implications for occupational health and safety. This is an area that deserves greater attention in the study of precarious work. Trucking is classified as one of the highest risk occupations in the US with Heavy and Tractor-Trailer Truck Drivers having the highest number of work fatalities of any other occupation (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2012). Nearly 15 million truck drivers are susceptible to a wide array of occupationally induced health conditions (Apostolopoulos, S?nmez, Shattell, 2010). These conditions are exemplified by high morbidity and mortality rates associated with: exposures to poor air quality and toxins from prolonged exposure to diesel emissions; insufficient diets and limited availability of nutritional foods available in truck stops and gas stations; injuries from accidents (more so than the average population); anxiety and stressors from deadlines, scheduling, long work hours, truck repair responsibilities, traffic congestion and safety concerns; being sedentary in truck cabs for long hours at a time; and unpaid wait times at ports, terminals and distribution centers (Williamson, Bohle, Quinlan, & Kennedy, 2009; Apostolopoulos, S?nmez, Shattell 2010; Hricko 2006; Gonzalez, Minkler, Garcia, et al. 2011). As owner-operators the drivers are not provided with health insurance by their employer and thus may lack access to the health care required to address the variety of common conditions. The fact so many of these drivers have limited access to health care indicates serious economic and public health concerns. Port-based research indicates that 68% of Houston drayage drivers, 67% of Seattle short haul drivers and 71.7% of Jacksonville’s owner-operators reported a lack of health insurance (Harrison, et al., 2007; Port Jobs, 2007; Jaffee & Rowley, 2009). Of the owner operators who do report having insurance, less than one percent (0.93%) received health insurance from their company (Bensman & Bromberg, 2008). ADDIN RW.CITE{{71 Bensman, D 2009}} Warehouse/Distribution CentersWhen shipping containers leave the port terminal by drayage, a common destination for the drayed containers is the warehouse/distribution center (W/DC). In the supply chain, W/DCs serve a critical function for inventory control and the provision of just-in-time delivery (see Bonacich & Wilson, 2008, chapter 6). Under the now more tightly controlled “pull” system of supply chain management and logistics under buyer-driven commodity chains, there has been a sharp functional shift in these facilities from formerly goods- storage to currently goods-moving. That is, the emphasis is no longer on stockpiling just-in-case, but sorting, distributing, and consolidating the goods so that they can keep moving and arrive just-in-time. For this reason logistics professionals eschew the label “warehouse”. For goods arriving by container vessel to the United States, the W/DCs are an integral component in the port logistics infrastructure. It is here where the goods are unloaded, sorted, consolidated, and sometimes subjected to some additional value-added processing/packaging. Consistent with the goods-on-the-move imperative, much of the activity is devoted to “cross-docking” where subsets of containerized goods are removed and then placed directly in a truck docked on the opposite side of the W/DC for delivery elsewhere. The industry is characterized by both large and small firms, as well as large and small facilities. W/DCs may be owned and operated by the manufacturers of the product produced, the retailer, or a third party logistics (3PL) firm. Most of the organizational and management literature on W/DCs falls into the realm of technical mathematical models and operations research strategies for the design, planning, and control of W/DC systems (see e.g. Chow, Choy, Lee, & Lau, 2006). Where it is placed in the larger context of an element of the supply chain, W/DCs are linked with the concept of “agility” and the need to have “goods pass through the supply chain quickly so that companies can respond rapidly to exploit market-place demand, without the risk of holding inventories of goods that may become obsolete” (Baker, 2004, p. 113).There has been scant labor-related research conducted on W/DC workers (again, a noteworthy exception is Bonacich & Wilson, 2008, chapter 9) but this is rapidly changing. Some of the best investigations of working conditions have been reported in various mass media publications (see e.g. Jamieson, 2011). The majority of workers in the W/DC sector are “picker-packers”. The picking side involves locating, scanning, and sending an item, often on conveyer belt, where the packer prepares the item to leave the W/DC. These workers also typically move materials as well and therefore engage in a wide range of physical activity. In contrast to drayage, the factory-like workplace conditions in the W/DC sector provide a greater potential for communication and collective action. However, due to the strategic fragmentation or fissuring of the industry among various types of ownership and management arrangements this potential faces severe challenges (see Weil, 2014). While the W/DC facilities might be owned and managed by a producer or large retailer, it is increasingly common for the W/DC function to be outsourced to a third party logistics (3PL) company. That logistics firm, in turn, contracts with temp staffing agencies for labor services (Cho, Christman, Emsellem, Ruckelshaus, & Smith, 2012). It would appear that this arrangement is most common, and therefore labor conditions are least favorable, in the W/DCs that serve the containerized cargo supply chain where there is the greatest pressure by large retailers to “sweat the assets” and squeeze costs out of the logistics network. Not surprisingly, warehouse work is plagued by higher than average employee turnover rates, and job security is the most significant factor in the predictor for recruitment and retention of warehouse workers (Min, 2007). Studies of temporary workers have also identified warehouses as a location where employment is particularly insecure, poorly paid, and stressful (see McAllister, 1998).There are several interrelated conditions that characterize this sector -– low wage compensation, anti-union activity, labor flexibilization, and racialization (Bonacich & Wilson, 2008). The single largest physical concentration of W/DCs serving intermodal container cargo is found in the Inland Empire in California. This is also where most research on working conditions has been conducted (Bonacich & Wilson, 2008; DeLara, 2013). Bonacich and Wilson (2008, p. 226) estimate that 90,000 W/DC workers are employed in the Inland Empire. Their analysis of this region and industry highlights the role of racialization, temporary staffing agencies, and non-unionization in minimizing labor costs. They estimate that over half the workers are Latino, over half of the workforce is employed through temporary agencies, and union representation is largely non-existent (see also Ciscel, Smith, & Mendoza, 2003 on immigrant labor and warehouse work).Labor flexibilization, the externalization of cost, and non-unionization are all accomplished through the widespread use of temporary staffing agencies in this industry. One survey of the literature on the planning and control of warehouse systems makes the following human resource recommendation: “Flexibilization of labor is an important issue in warehouses. Flexibilization implies that throughout the day personnel are shifted between activities whenever extra capacity is needed. Furthermore, if the available labor capacity is insufficient, then temporary staff are hired from an agency. Accordingly, labor costs will be minimized” (van den Berg, 1999, p. 760). Human resource and worker compensation costs are also avoided and externalized to the temp agencies. Bonacich and Wilson’s (2008, p. 236) analysis of the W/DC sector in the Inland Empire concludes “one of the major motives for the use of temp agencies is to avoid dealing with workers ’comp”. Further, an employment relationship with a temp agency, rather than the de facto employer that owns the W/DC, effectively undermines the ability of the workers to form a union or engage in collective bargaining. Finally, as they do with their commodity suppliers, the large retailers outsource the W/DC function to firms that then use temporary service agencies to recruit workers thus insulating the retailers, who are now twice removed, from responsibility, accountability, and liability (Cho, Christman, Emsellem, Ruckelshaus, & Smith, 2012; Kalleberg & Marsden, 2006) . The net result is low wages, high stress, and insecure employment for most W/DC workers (see McClelland, 2012 for a colorful insider look at the retail W/DC).Weil (2014, p. 160-7) provides a detailed description of the inter-firm relations involved in the W/DC sector based on the case of Walmart as the lead firm and the Inland Empire as the regional location. It fits the prevailing pattern described above. Walmart outsources its W/DC logistics functions to Schneider Logistics, an asset-based firm that provides the full range of logistics and transportation services in North America and China. Schneider owns the DC, has direct employees, but also relies heavily upon subcontractors for the increasingly large portion of its temporary workforce. One of these firms, now twice removed from Walmart, is Impact Logistics, who supplies the staffing. Among the services provided by Impact Logistics, and highlighted on their webpage (Impact Logistics, 2014), is “flex labor”, with a fixed cost-per-unit-labor model, as well as on-site management establishing works standards and procedures, and ensuring worker communication, supervision and training. In their promotional video (with Bachman Turner Overdrive’s “Takin Care of Business” playing in the background) they tout their role as “the nations leading labor provider” specializing in “professional freight handling” for which “you pay only for work performed, not hours worked” from an operation that will “consistently promote Christian principles” and motivate its associates using a “performance pay scale based on work completed”. As this suggests, and similar to drayage trucking, there has been a trend in the W/DC sector toward piecework – that is, payment by the number of items picked, packed, or moved/unloaded rather than an hourly wage (Warehouse Workers for Justice, 2010). An extensive study of the W/DC sector in the Chicago metropolitan area of Will County Illinois, which has seen rapid growth in the logistics industry due to its establishment as a distribution hub, was conducted by the Warehouse Workers for Justice (2010). Based on a sample of over 300 workers at 150 W/DCs, they report that 63% of workers in warehouses were temps; the median hourly wage was $9.00; the majority of workers receive poverty level wages with temps paid on average $3.48 less than direct employees, 25% of workers had to rely an public assistance to make ends meet, 37% had to work a second job, only 4% of temps had health insurance, and 20% had been injured on the job. Central and northern New Jersey has also seen a rapid expansion of the W/DC sector (Gonos and Martino, 2011; Rowe, 2012). In their study of central New Jersey communities where there is a high concentration of Latino immigrants, Gonos and Martino (2011) find a concentration of temp agencies that contract with the W/DC industry. The agencies have set up locations in the communities where the “shape up” is conducted on a daily basis involving the requirement that workers show up at a specific time, accept assignments at various W/DCs serving the region, and arrive to work in agency vans (for which a daily transportation fee is deducted from their paycheck). The agencies compensate workers at between $7.15 and $9.00 an hour which is insufficient to satisfy the self-sufficiency standard in New Jersey (Gonos and Martino, 2011). The net effect is: “erratic work schedules, poverty wages, hazardous conditions, demeaning treatment, and no voice or job control for workers (Gonos and Martino, 2011, p. 500).Like the drayage workers, W/DC workers also face significant safety and health issues as a result of their precarious work status. It is interesting to note that the majority of the articles and research that emerges from a scholarly literature search on “warehouse workers” focus on ergonomics, occupational safety and health, and the biomechanical dynamics involved in heavy lifting and exertion. This suggests, correctly, that W/DC work is relatively high risk and, accordingly, so is the workers compensation rate. At the most general level, there is a developing literature on the employee health and safety implications of precarious work (Quinlan, Mayhew & Bohle, 2001; Quinlan & Bohle, 2009; Tompa, Scott-Marshall, Dolinschi, Trevithick, & Bhattacharyya, 2007; Lewchuk, Clarke, & DeWolff, 2011). Quinlan and Bohle (2009) advance a model of the factors determining the unfavorable occupational safety and health status of precarious workers based on pressure, disorganization, and regulatory failure (known as the PDR model). More specifically, negative safety and health conditions stem from pressures of economic insecurity that create competition and vulnerability, workplace disorganization in the form of unstable relationships and obligations, and absence of regulatory policy, enforcement, and worker awareness. This model has been applied to a qualitative study of temporary agency workers (Underhill & Quinlan, 2011) with the overall conclusion that agency workers have heightened levels of vulnerability as a result of the triangular relationship among the workers, the agency, and the host employer. Employment and income insecurity lead to intense competition for work and thus “contribute to a range of hazardous practices including work intensification, cutting-corners, accepting hazardous tasks, working when injured and multiple job holding” (p.399). According to a study by ProPublica (Pierce, Larson & Grabell, 2013), temporary workers are disproportionately concentrated in the highest risk occupations being 68% more likely to work in the 20% of the occupations with the highest injury rates. Examining workers compensation claims for five states revealed that the incidence of workplace injury for temporary workers was between 36 and 72% higher than for non-temporary workers. In addition, as piece rate compensation methods become increasingly common, based on how much cargo they unload or package, work intensification arises which leads to higher risk of injury. “Work intensification was raised frequently by focus group participants, especially those performing repetitive low skilled tasks such as in call centres and warehousing. One agency storeperson contrasted his experience with that of host employees: When there’s clocks on you and you’re timed on a lot of things, you always run the risk of accidents happening more so than if you didn’t have the clock on. The clock is on the agency people even more, you can just see the permanents work slower, because they know they’ve got a job” (Underhill & Quinlan, 2011, p. 406). The triangular relationship has also had a direct impact on occupational health and safety concerns: “Most common was the inability of agency workers to get either party to respond to OHS concerns, both arguing that it was the other party’s responsibility. A focus group warehouse storeperson expressed frustration and a sense of powerlessness with the refusal of employers and hosts to respond to OHS concerns” (Underhill & Quinlan, 2011, p. 409). Overall, it is clear that a significant and growing portion of those working in both drayage trucking and W/DC picking/packaging qualify as precarious workers. What is more difficult to determine are the exact numbers of workers that fall into these specific occupations of interest. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (2013) Occupational Employment Statistics (BLS/OES) provides numbers of workers and wage/salary data for broad occupational categories and the sub-categories that would capture some portion of these workers. In the annual May 2013 report of the BLS/OES report, the majority of logistics workers can be found under the major occupational heading of Transportation and Material Moving Occupations (53-0000). In 2013, this broad occupational category accounted for 6.8% of the total U.S. employment for these data. Within that category, port truck drivers would be included under the subcategory of Heavy and Tractor-Trailer Truck Drivers (53-3032), which accounted for 17.6% of total employment within this occupational category. There is no way to determine the precise number are involved in port trucking or how many are owner-operators. The mean income, for this truck driver category as a whole, is $40,940, which is based on the hourly mean wage of $19.68 multiplied by year-round fulltime hours (2,080). Given what we know from surveys of port truck drivers reported above, and the piecework nature of compensation, this figure overstates the annual income of port drayage drivers. Within the broad Transportation and Material Moving Occupations category, there are two subcategories – “Laborers and Freight, Stock, and Material Movers, Hand” (53-7062) and “Packers and Packagers, Hand” (53-7064) -- that would include the W/DC workers described above. Together the two occupational subcategories account for 32.8% of the transportation and material moving jobs. For the former, the mean annual income is $26,690 based on an hourly wage of $12.82; for the latter it is $22,670 based on an hourly wage of $10.90. For these two occupations, it is possible to obtain a more accurate picture of the proportion working through temporary agencies. This can be determined by examining the BLS/OES data that is organized by industry. One of the industry classifications is Employment Services (NAICS 561300). Overall, Transportation and Material Moving occupations account for the largest share of workers among major occupational categories in the Employment Services industry at 21%. More specifically, Laborers and Freight, Stock, and Material Movers make up 64%, and Packers and Packagers 17%, of the employment service workers in this occupational category. As one would expect, the reported mean wage rate for these employment service workers is also lower than for the group as a whole (as reported above) at $10.67 for Freight, Stock, and Material Movers, and $9.72 for Packers and Packagers. Finally, the trend for both occupations is toward greater temp agency employment. From 2009 to 2013, the percent of workers in these two occupations combined, working through employment agencies, has increased from 14.0 to 19.3%. This post-recession trend toward greater precariousness is consistent with the labor market experience of U.S. workers generally (see National Employment Law Project, 2012). In terms of prospects for expansion or contraction, among the twenty occupations projected to grow the fastest over the 2010-2020 period, Heavy and Tractor-Trailer Truck Drivers, and Laborers and Freight, Stock, and Material Movers, are in the eight and ninth positions with estimated growth of 21% and 15%, respectively with a total of 646,000 workers. Therefore, the growth of this sector of the economy will likely contribute further to the precarious state of the labor market unless actions are taken to stem the tide of employment insecurity and substandard compensation. IMPROVING WORKING CONDITIONS: WORKER ACTIONS AND POLICY PROPOSALSThere has been increasing awareness, mobilization, and organization around the precariousness of work generally (see Stone, 2006) as well as within the logistics industry specifically; this may facilitate an improvement in working conditions and compensation. This is evidenced by a growing number of informal and formal actions by workers and their allies based on a two-pronged strategy involving both collective action through walkouts, protests, and strikes as well as legal actions charging employers with a range of labor law violations. Among drayage workers, given the less than ideal working conditions reported above, one might expect some labor agitation and organization. In their survey of drivers, Bensman and Bromberg (2008) included a question on the willingness of the drivers to join a union. Two-thirds of the NJ drivers indicated they would be “very likely” to join a union “if they could”; in Jacksonville Florida, possessing a more conservative political climate, 47% of the owner-operators indicated that they would join a union (Jaffee and Rowley, 2009). However, port drayage drivers may be one of the most challenging labor forces to organize (Belzer, 2000; Belman & Monaco, 2001; Bensman, 2009). This is due to the drayage industry structure that is highly fragmented, atomized, and competitive, coupled with, more critically, a workforce hamstrung by their status as “owner operators” that legally prohibits collective organization or collusion. In spite of these obstacles, there are some indications of growing agitation. Labor unions have initiated a number of organizing efforts. The AFL-CIO launched a “ports protection” campaign designed to address the range of working conditions facing drivers that were highlighted above. In partnership with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Change to Win has sought to bring stakeholders together to improve labor and security standards at the nation’s ports. The issues facing port truckers have also contributed to a broad alliance coupling environmental with economic concerns. Most significant is the Coalition of Clean and Safe Ports linking labor, environmental, and community groups (e.g. the Natural Resource Defense Council, the Teamsters, and the Long Beach Alliance for Children with Asthma) concerned about the public health consequences for workers and communities of diesel-burning trucks that carry containers on and off the port terminal. Because many owner-operators are either driving early model trucks that do not meet environmentally sound emission standards, or are unable to incur the cost of retrofitting existing vehicles to comply with environmental standards, the coalition has worked to get ports to implement concession agreements with trucking companies that would require emission compliant vehicles and employee drivers. The latter provision – known as the “employee-mandate” -- would reduce the number of owner-operators, increase the number of employee drivers, provide greater economic compensation and security for drivers, and make it legally feasible to organize a union. The test case for this strategy was the Los Angeles Clean Trucks program, which was implemented in October 2008 but was halted by a court injunction lawsuit filed by the American Trucking Association. A Federal appeals court struck down the employee-mandate in 2011, eliminating the possibility of broader application of this policy to other US ports.Drivers at West Coast ports have also organized a continuing series of strikes and work stoppages aimed at improving compensation and working conditions. These actions have been linked to their misclassification as independent contractors, the inability to set hours of work, the restriction against working for more than a single trucking company, and wage theft (Mongelluzzo, 2013; Jaffe, 2013). Port drivers for different trucking companies have engaged in various labor actions in order to bring attention to these workplace issues and establish the right to form a union. In the Fall of 2013, Los Angeles port drivers for Green Fleet Systems, Pac 9 Transportation and American Logistics International went out on strike. In the Spring of 2014, the Teamsters supported a Justice for Port Truck Drivers 48-hour work stoppage at LA/Long Beach by drivers working for four trucking companies in order to address wage theft, workers’ rights, and misclassification. They were joined by drivers at the East coast port of Savannah who were also protesting their status as independent contractors. Most recently, port drivers in LA engaged in a wider work stoppage with Pac 9 Transportation, Green Fleet Services, and Total Transportation Services that temporarily shut down three Marine Terminals including Evergreen Container Terminal, one of the ports largest, as longshore workers walked off the job in support. Unlike prior strikes, that have been scheduled for a duration of 48 hours, this strike is an open-ended labor action (Bradbury, 2014). Some of the most significant measurable gains for port drivers have been achieved through legal actions against these trucking and transportation firms. A recent study by the National Employment Labor Project -- The Big Rig Overhaul -- reports that up to 400 complaints have been filed with the California Division of Labor Standards Enforcement for wage theft associated with misclassification (Smith, Marvy, & Zelonick, 2014). In one representative case, seven drivers working for Pacer Cartage were awarded $2.2 million for “unlawful deductions, reimbursable business expenses, interest, waiting time penalties and attorney fees” (TruckingInfo, 2014). As summarized by the hearing officer in the case, “The defendant considered the plaintiffs to be independent contractors; however, the amount of control exhibited by the defendant over the plaintiffs was to such a degree that the defendant knew or should have known that the plaintiffs were employees” (TruckingInfo, 2014). Further, there have been more than thirty official rulings since 2011 regarding the misclassification of port truckers, with state and federal courts and agencies also concluding in almost every case that the drivers meet the criteria as employees rather than independent contractors (Smith, Marvy, & Zelonick, 2014). The mounting legal violations are stimulating action at all government levels. “By treating employee drivers as independent contractors, port trucking companies are violating a host of state and federal labor and tax laws, including provisions related to wage and hour standards, income taxes, unemployment insurance, organizing, collective bargaining, and workers’ compensation” (Smith, Marvy, & Zelonick, 2014, p.4)If port drivers can secure formal employee status with transportation and logistics firms, they have then established one of the necessary conditions for union representation and collective bargaining. Drivers in NY/NJ and LA/Long Beach, employed by the Australian company Toll Group, have recently won union representation with the Teamsters. Their negotiated contract includes a higher wage rate, overtime, affordable health insurance, and a pension plan. This represents the long-term goal for port drivers.In the W/DC sector, there are related challenges and objectives. Warehouse Workers United – aligned with Change to Win -- has launched a campaign to improve conditions for what is now one of the fastest growing sectors of the logistics industry. The key issues are a living wage, ending the use of temporary staffing, providing health benefits, and allowing workers to organize a union for collective bargaining. Much of the effort has been directed at facilities in the Inland Empire region east of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach (see Bonacich & De Lara, 2009). There have been several high-profile events, and media reports, designed to draw attention to the working conditions in this industry and region (Meyerson, 2009; Arrieta, 2009). Warehouse Workers for Justice has also formed as an organization to build solidarity among W/DC workers in the state of Illinois where Chicago stands as a major logistics hub for the North American distribution and supply chain (Bybee, 2009). More recenty, in 2011, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) was able to win an election representing about 300 production workers at an Ikea-owned plant in Danville, Va. This was followed by successful organizing efforts of workers in a Maryland and Georgia Ikea W/DC (Vail, 2012). Walmart’s W/DC workers are also on the offensive. Joined by the Teamsters and United Food and Commercial Workers, Walmart warehouse workers have held marches and strikes at both warehouse and store locations as well as at the Walmart headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. In the latter action they presented petitions and met with executives over the wage rates, working conditions, and anti-union intimidation prevalent at Walmart (Moberg, 2013; Slaughter, 2013). On the legal front, in a highly significant and extended case, Warehouse Workers United took action in 2011 against warehouse operator Schneider Logistics and the two staffing agencies -- Premier Warehousing Ventures and Impact Logistics -- for oppressive working conditions and sub-minimum wage compensation at W/DCs operated for Walmart in Mira Loma, California (Fowler, 2012; Medina, 2012; Weil, 2014). The three firms were fined a total of $1 million for the violations. More recently, Schneider agreed to pay $21 million in a broader class-action settlement brought by 1800 warehouse workers who charged illegal underpayment based on piece-rate and non-compensated time on the job, denial of required overtime compensation, and retaliation for filing a complaint. What was most noteworthy in the latter ruling was that Walmart, given its direct hand in the warehouse operational procedures as well as the terms and conditions of employment of workers, had joint employer status (see Milam-Perez, 2014). Linking responsibility for working conditions to the lead firm in the subcontracting-outsourcing cascade has established a precedent that can fuel subsequent efforts of W/DC workers. As Weil (2014, p. 203) has outlined, this could encourage lead companies to “choose to keep employment inside the organization” or, if they continue to employ outsourcing-subcontracting arrangements, “they might do so with greater scrutiny in the selection, monitoring, and coordination of those subordinate organizations given their heightened responsibility”. Several organizations – the National Law Employment Project (Cho et al. 2012; Smith, Bensman and Marvy, 2011; Smith, Marvy, & Zelonick, 2014) and Warehouse Workers for Justice (2010) -- that have conducted studies on working conditions in the drayage and W/DC sectors of the logistics industry have advanced a number of policy recommendations based on their findings. For workers in the W/DC sector, they (Warehouse Workers for Justice, 2010) recommend pathways to establish stable rather than precarious employment involving permanent employment, regular hours, and a living wage. This could be facilitated through incentives and taxpayer support to those firms that institute these human resource policies. Labor regulations should also be established and enforced, particularly as it apples to temporary/day labor and fair compensation procedures. This should include eliminating any illegal barriers to the right to organize and engage in collective bargaining. With regard to the Walmart-style of outsourcing and subcontracting logistics services and staffing, Cho et al. (2012) recommend not only the aggressive enforcement of existing labor laws but the adoption of innovative laws requiring full transparency in contracting relations, holding the supply chain head responsible for both conditions and violations, and establishing a code of ethics for conduct regulation contractors and subcontractors.For drayage truckers (Smith, Bensman and Marvy, 2011), the central recommendation is to require port trucking companies to hire the drivers as employees and to own the trucks used to haul shipping containers. This would address the substandard labor market conditions, the inefficiencies inherent in the current “owner-operator” model (Jaffee, 2013), and the environmental impact of aging and poorly maintained trucks. Accordingly, it is also proposed that relevant Federal agencies move to end the misclassification of drivers as independent contractors that has become the institutionalized basis for the abuse of drivers. On the legal front, it is recommended that there be a concerted effort to improve the effectiveness of state and federal enforcement agencies charged with labor law compliance; increase awareness of the costs, consequences and scope of driver misclassification as it relates to flagrant forms of tax and workers compensation evasion; and update labor and tax laws so that they can address the more recent and expanding employer strategies designed to reduce obligations, compensation and responsibility for workers (Smith, Marvy, & Zelonick, 2014). DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONThis paper has focused on two large and significant occupational categories -- W/DC pickers/packers and drayage truck drivers -- working in the intermodal logistics supply chain that are representative and emblematic of the larger trends toward and features associated with precarious labor. Just as economic sociologists are often encouraged to “follow the money”, scholars of organization, work, and labor would be well-advised to “follow the goods”. Not only will one discover under-analyzed areas of organizational and workplace dynamics, but it will also reveal some of the sources of shifting labor market practices linked to large-scale global processes such as trends toward precarious work. Situated between production and consumption are those who toil in the transportation and distribution of commodities. The pressure to reduce these costs, so that the cheap labor advantage of offshoring is not lost in commodity transit, provides a point of entry into analyzing these organizational and labor practices. But the down-chain pressures are not confined exclusively to labor costs; they also apply to the velocity of goods movement. Once containerized cargo arrives at a U.S. port it is vital, given the sequentially interdependent “just in time” supply-chain system, to move it as quickly and efficiently as possible avoiding any bottlenecks, slowdowns, or stoppages. This imperative provides a strategic opportunity for the exercise of potent labor actions. As Silver (2003) observes for transport workers: “Transport workers have possessed and continue to possess relatively strong workplace bargaining power. This is especially clear after we conceptualize their workplace as the entire network in which they are enmeshed. Thus, the source of the workplace bargaining power is to be found less in the direct impact of their actions on immediate (often public) employers and more on the upstream/downstream impact of the failure to deliver goods, services, and people to their destinations.”(p. 100). The desire by capital to ensure stability and certainty in the movement of cargo works to the advantage of labor, who are able to exercise “interdependent power” (Piven, 2006).It is this logic that has led observers to describe container-shipping ports as nodal chokepoints in global commodity chains (Bonacich, 2003) where labor engages in disruptive action that can rapidly cripple the global movement of commodities. Lund and Wright (2003) have explored how the tighter integration of supply chains, using information technologies, poses both threats to and opportunities for union bargaining power. As they note, the sequential interdependence of the intermodal system has “the potential for a shut-down or stoppage of one enterprise to have a domino-like effect throughout the broader supply chain potentially wreaking havoc within and across industries.” (p. 103). As an example they point to the United Parcel Service strike of 1997. A more salient example, for our purposes, is the 2002 West coast lockout of dockworkers. This model of disruptive action by the workers, enabled by the dependence of the powerful on the compliance and cooperation of subordinate classes and groups, has a long history of successfully advancing progressive social change (Piven, 2006). Alongside these direct forms of labor action are legal strategies that have been proving to be especially effective in getting at the source of labor market difficulties faced by workers in these two sectors. For the port truck drivers, the issue of misclassification is central to both the precarious work status as well as the inability to collectively organize and bargain for an improvement in working conditions. Significant progress has been made through class action law suits against trucking and transportation firms and state/federal legislation to prevent and enforce such labor law violations. For the W/DC workers, the core issue is outsourcing/subcontracting that is designed to insulate the lead companies from taking responsibility for labor conditions in the W/DCs that process and distribute their goods. Legal actions taken against subcontractors and labor recruitment firms, which also hold the lead companies accountable, have the potential to address the central source of precariousness for W/DC workers. 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