Introducing “On the Seams”
A newsletter on labor and logistics.
The largest private-sector employers in the United States are currently Walmart, Amazon, UPS, Fedex, and Home Depot, in that order. All have built out sophisticated logistical operations that constitute key components of the circulatory system of the American economy. The labor movement has long understood the importance of logistics—along with manufacturing, the other “historic basis of labor’s power,” in Peter Olney’s words—and no one today would deny, as Joe Allen has stated, that the logistics revolution undergirding the rise of Walmart and then Amazon has “created a new industrial working class with potentially enormous economic power.”
But accounts of such operations tend to focus on their intimidating size and power. 16 million twenty-foot container units through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach every year. 400 Fedex flights out of the Memphis cargo airport every day. More than 1,000 packages delivered by Amazon every minute. What is labor to do in the face of such corporate behemoths? Just as many labor leaders saw the prospect of organizing the giant manufacturing facilities of the 1930s as wasted money, so too is it easy to believe that these companies run such magnificently efficient and sophisticated operations that labor could never hope to organize them.
It’s undeniable that the sheer size and scale of modern logistical operations is mind-boggling. Anyone who has been inside a modern “warehouse”—at this point, a legacy term for the great variety of specialized and automated distribution nodes—cannot help but be overwhelmed by it.
At the same time, as historian John Womack argues in Labor Power and Strategy, every technical system has “seams,” locations and relations of vulnerability that can be seized and pressured in such a way as to gain real leverage. It is useful, in one sense, to be reminded always of the power and reach of the most powerful corporations in the country, but such talk can make it seem like their defenses are impenetrable. They are not—if it’s built, it can break, as Womack says—but understanding how leverage might be gained and labor power exercised is not a straightforward matter. It involves digging into the geography, technology, flows, relations, and networks that comprise the contemporary supply chain and finding ways to intervene.
“On the Seams” is dedicated to doing just this. In some cases, we will be translating existing academic or industry analysis into more common parlance or porting it into the context of labor strategy. In others, we will present our own research or reporting dedicated to contemporary logistical systems in their constant and rapid state of flux. Much of the time we will produce traditional articles or primers, but many more rudimentary “field notes” will also be included, given again the speed at which distributional networks are evolving as well as the innumerable threads to pull on at various points along the supply chain.
We hope that this newsletter develops into an informational hub for organizers, researchers, and labor strategists, and with that in mind, we encourage you to reach out to us at ontheseams.newsletter@gmail.com with any tips, story ideas, article corrections, or map updates (yes, there will be maps!). Contemporary logistical networks are changing much too quickly for us to keep track of ourselves. If this newsletter is going to be a success, it requires a similar evolution of informational networks amongst people with a firm belief that the corporate giants of our day can and will be organized.