Chokepoints in Logistics. Organizing potentials in the logistics sector in Poland in times of crises

On January 9 2024, the HuLog project will give an online seminar where our partners from the University of Wrocław Szymon Pilch and Adam Mrozowicki will give a presentation about “Chokepoints in Logistics. Organizing potentials in the logistics sector in Poland in times of crises”.

The presentation reconstructs the worker’s power (“organising potentials”) of Amazon’s Poland employees in times of polycrises and it will focus on the following:

• Logistics as choke-point of global capitalism (Alimahomed-Wilson & Ness 2018): further rise of workers’ structural power during Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent, interlinked crises vs. ongoing precarisation, algorithmic control and anti-union strategies.
• The question of the conditions which allow workers’ structural power and societal power to be “converted” (Bourdieu 1986) into associational power: What are the organizing potentials in the context of increased workers’ structural power in the times of post-pandemic interlinked crises?
• Interviews with workers and trade unionists in three sections of the logistics in Poland: logistic centres, parcel- and online food-delivery, truck transport.
• Poland is chosen as the representative country in which private logistics industry is very weak unionised, but at the same time one can observe a variety of union innovative practices in the recent years to mobilise and represent workers.

If you are interested in participating in the event, please, register here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSczVXjldfhgJpEVcjw2yExXAtMS3lUALxTBujVolB8-t0yIEA/viewform