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The Most Wanted Freight in America
Not all freight is equally attractive to criminals.
Recent cargo theft trends show electronics, food products, clothing, and auto parts among the most frequently targeted commodities. As organized crime groups continue adapting their tactics, freight fraud is becoming just as dangerous as physical theft.
for those of us still buying physical media - is it a hot take to say $10 for standard shipping is too much, especially when even preorders no longer get delivered on release day?
Port Strike 2024
Right on the heels of Helene we get a massive strike called by the International Longshoreman’s Association, which went into effect today and impacts ports on the east coast and in Texas. The ILA has not yet released their demands, but in their most recent statement from yesterday they highlighted the unfair nature of American shipping and the ways workers are fucked over for company profit. Same old same old.
What You Need To Know:
approximately 45,000 workers are on strike in US ports from Maine to Texas
immediate supply chain gaps will show up in things like imported produce - if you like bananas, stock up now, and freeze them or refrigerate them to maximize their usable lifespan
as of now we don’t know how we can support the strike, but check official ILA channels and accounts and their website linked above for updates
there will be a lot of bad press about this strike. I’ve already seen an article from Barron’s about how dockworkers make six figures but are demanding more. our enemies are NOT working people who make slightly more than we do! our enemies are the shipping companies and freight brokerages who make billions in profit while the ones who transport the goods make less than $1M/year! be prepared to advocate for workers who may be doing better than you’re personally doing - they don’t deserve less, YOU deserve more.
more on the strike from the Associated Press
UPDATE as of 12:00 EST 1 October 2024:
the ILA is asking for a 77% wage increase across the next 6 years and an end to all automation. the counteroffer that was rejected was a 50% increase and limits on automation.
will continue to update as new information emerges
https://www.instagram.com/samparkgloballogistics/
Sampark Global is in a class of its own. The company has been providing top-notch logistics solutions for businesses all over the world for many years now, and is widely considered to be the best in the business.
Why the next 10 years in the Mobile Apps for Transportation and logistics industry will smash the last 10
The last couple of years have seen a lot of dynamic activity in the logistics and transportation industry. We witnessed multiple trends on a global level. From traditional supply chains being fragmented into smaller manageable parts to the rise of on-demand delivery services, the logistics industry has been on a roll! However, we believe the next decade is going to overshadow these trends and grow multiple folds.
There is a real possibility of fleets becoming totally autonomous as well as Trucks platooning and autonomous trucks could be a reality by 2030. Semi-autonomous trucks will reach a penetration rate of 5 percent by 2030. Rolls Royce has announced plans to launch autonomous cargo ships (or as the Economist called it, “Ghost Ships” ) by 2030. While replacing or aiding man was a critical criterion for logistics and autonomous technology in material handling, for fleets, the value of autonomy centers around fuel economy. However, fuel is still the most overbearing influence on the assets and fleets of the industry, with all this autonomy, a new influence is emerging that could have a far-reaching impact on the supply chain.
With customers demanding cheap, green, and fast supply chains, the incumbent logistics companies look for ways to create unique value propositions. Some major industrial customers still want the comfort of dealing with one logistics partner, yet they look at new ways of partnering.
Implications for The Logistics Industry
As networks become more fully shared, companies will focus their competitive edge on customer expectations. Companies that can build on a strong brand profile from improved margins, by partnering with other firms to cover less profitable delivery routes. National posts, on the other hand, may struggle as they are forced to cover these routes and lose volume in more profitable regions.
Sea freight and trucking companies are likely to benefit the most from the new ‘PI’ standards, which make it easier to fully use their capacity, and increased profitability is likely to reduce the pressure for consolidation in this sector. Warehousing will benefit from cost efficiencies too, as automated loading and picking systems based on ‘PI’ standards are implemented. CyberSecurity will be a crucial issue for companies that shift to new data standards and greater data sharing.
The competitive landscape changes markedly here. Online retailers expand their own logistics offerings. In some cases, this reduces their use of external providers but doesn’t replace it entirely.
Rise of mobility as a service
Others use their own sophisticated analysis of customer data to increase logistics efficiency substantially. In order to fully use their capacity, players like the large grocery chains and big-box retailers begin offering their own logistics services and look to combine their brick-and-mortar and online supply chains. Streaming services, such as Netflix, have fundamentally changed the way people search for, consume, and pay for media. Transportation now stands at a similar frontier.
Ticketless public transit
In the United Kingdom, transit riders can use the Ticketless mobile-ticketing platform to move from one point to another with minimal friction.11 UrbanThings, the company behind Ticketless, will soon launch a pilot of the “Be-in/Be-Out” system, in which the traveler’s Ticketless app will communicate via Bluetooth to track their journey and manage fare collection without them having to take their phone out, providing a no-stop travel experience.
The biggest benefit of embracing mobile apps for the logistics industry is the real-time data available to both the client and carrier company. Mobile apps provide a plethora of information available at the fingertips of decision makers in the logistics industry. This further adds to the efficiency brought about by the adoption of mobile technology in the industry as a whole. In all, the next decade for logistics and transportation will clearly smash the last ten.
Source https://bit.ly/38aYplS
JACOBIN MAGAZINE
Today’s global economy relies on the steady flow of goods, products, and raw materials around the world. Companies like Amazon have become so massive that they now ship as many as four hundred packages per second. But this all depends on the labor of millions of workers in docks, warehouses, and logistics centers. If the global supply chain is broken, capitalism grinds to a halt.
This “logistics revolution” has opened up both new fronts and unique challenges in worker organizing. If the labor movement and the Left want to take advantage of it, they’ll have to understand both its global implications and shop-floor realities.
With this in mind, Chris Browne of the Pluto Books podcast Radicals in Conversation spoke to some key researchers and organizers in the field: Jake Alimahomed-Wilson, professor of sociology at California State University, Long Beach and co-editor of Choke Points: Logistics Workers Disrupting the Global Supply Chain; Katy Fox-Hodess, a lecturer in work, employment, people, and organizations at the University of Sheffield; and Kim Moody, a founder of Labor Notes and the author of numerous books on US labor, most recently On New Terrain, and a visiting scholar at the Centre for the Study of the Production of the Built Environment at the University of Westminster.
Chris Browne:
What is the logistics industry? And who do we mean when we talk about logistics workers?
Jake Alimahomed-Wilson:
If you order something from Amazon and it arrives on your doorstep, there’s a whole chain of workers around the world in the logistics sector that moves that good.
Starting from a production worker, it’s loaded onto a pallet into a container, and there’s six million containers moving right now around the world. The container is then placed on the back of a truck and brought to a port.
The port workers load those goods onto a massive container ship, which seafarers — another logistics worker — move to another port. From there dockers will unload the goods and either port truckers or rail workers — both logistics workers — will move the goods to a distribution center or warehouse, where another group of logistics workers is toiling.
The logistics sector has become a key element in the modern just-in-time global economy. Time is a crucial part of today’s capitalism.
Katy Fox-Hodess:
Logistics actually started out as a military science, and it was only after the Second World War that people in the business world started seeing logistics as something that might offer a competitive advantage. Over time, particularly since the 1980s, for transnational corporations that are heavily engaged in international commerce, logistics became the key element of competitive advantage.
That’s where the power comes from: global commerce as we know it today couldn’t exist without the logistics industry. Prior to the 1960s, and in many parts of the world more recently than that, the way goods were moved was so different. You’d have goods produced in a single location, packaged up in a variety of different ways, taken to ports in a variety of different ways, repackaged every step of the way.
What some big corporations figured out was that by introducing some technological innovations — particularly containerization — they could make the process go many, many times more smoothly.
Global logistics sites depend on what Jake called “just in time,” where ideally the goods don’t spend any time sitting around. Ultimately that’s the source of this competitive advantage. Time is what potentially gives workers in this industry a lot of power. If you’re able to disrupt an industry that is absolutely dependent on moving things quickly there are huge potential losses for the employers.
Kim Moody:
I recently got a tour of the area around Chicago where these huge warehouses and internodal yards are. All of them are brand new. The way logistics has ended up being organized is around these huge “clusters.”
These clusters are based around large metropolitan areas and all draw on what you might call the “reserve army of labor” — mostly workers of color who came into these warehouses in the last ten to fifteen years. In the Chicago area the official estimate is that there are about 160,000 people in this cluster. That’s actually an undercount because they don’t count other workers like rail or IT workers, which would bring it to around 200,000.
What they’ve done is recreate what business in the US tried to destroy thirty years ago when they moved out of cities like Detroit or Gary or Pittsburgh. They tried to get away from these huge clusters of blue-collar workers, particularly unionized ones and workers of color. Now, in order to move goods — across much more spread out production chains than in the past — they have recreated these huge concentrations of low-paid workers.
These clusters are choke points in a very real sense. If you stop a small percentage of activity going on in these places, you back up the whole movement of goods and the economy.
The problem is that although there is organizing activity going on, the unions haven’t really learned to function together.
Katy Fox-Hodess:
My first job after graduating from university twelve years ago was as an organizer for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), the powerful port and warehouse workers’ union on the west coast of the United States, which has a long and storied left-wing history.
I was working an organizing campaign at the warehouse of the Blue Diamond almond factory in Sacramento California. California is the largest almond producer in the world, and the vast majority of almonds are exported through its ports.
The union had identified this as a strategic organizing target for very good reasons: the almonds are processed and immediately taken to the port for export, so there should be a good deal of leverage through the supply chain. And yet, though this was a hard-fought campaign with many amazing worker activists who put years into this, ultimately it was unsuccessful. The reasons that it was unsuccessful have a lot to tell us about the difficulties of organizing in this sector.
First, warehouse work tends to be heavily dominated by agency workers or subcontracted workers. Workers in Sacramento faced enormous challenges, despite being in a “union town” with lots of public sector workers. These have to do with the very weak labor law regime we have in the United States.
The company racked up dozens of labor law violations for what are called “unfair labor practices,” and just got a slap on the wrist. It was able to get rid of or discipline key activists and thoroughly intimidate a workforce that was already divided between subcontracted and permanent workers.
We have to be careful when we talk about logistics workers and the potential power that’s there because of their position in the economy. There are so many other contextual factors that are shaping the possibilities for logistics workers to organize. Some of those factors — particularly the role of the state — are difficult to overcome. And it’s even more difficult in other parts of the world.
Colombia, for instance, is the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists, who are regularly assassinated even today. Dockworkers in Colombia overwhelmingly are not unionized, even though they historically had a very strong national union. But after the privatization of the ports in the early nineties, the union disappeared overnight.
There have been fragmented, small-scale attempts to build the unions. Heroic efforts — but if you’re facing state-sanctioned violence, the challenges are clear.
Jake Alimahomed-Wilson:
Speaking of state violence, I wrote a chapter in Choke Points with Spencer Potiker on Palestinian truck drivers. In Palestine, Israel destroyed the historical trading seaport there. The airport was destroyed. So, the only way to move goods is via truck, but it’s not a smooth containerized process. It’s restricted by Israeli violence, and security checkpoints. For Palestinian truckers, their class exploitation cannot be removed from anti-Arab racism and Zionism.
(Continue Reading)
This constant push for speed, like “management by stress” in the immediate production process, puts enormous external pressure on workers all along the supply chain and within the logistics clusters. With increased competition, advanced technology, and the logistics revolution, more and more workers have found themselves locked into what amounts to a global supply chain gang. These chains, however, can be broken. Along with their interconnectivity, their very time-bound tension makes them extremely vulnerable to worker action.
On New Terrain: How Capital Is Reshaping The Battleground of Class War, by Kim Moody
Industries in the logistics network have also seen consolidation, part of the revolution in “the means of communication and transport” as Marx put it. After years of mergers, five rail freight carriers now employ 80 percent of those working in that industry. OPS and FedEx alone employed 40 percent of the country’s 1.7 million trucking and express delivery workers by 2014. If the next five trucking firms are added, the top seven employ almost half the workforce. Airlines have been merging at least since the 1960s, but in the last decade ten majors were reduced to four: Delta, American, United and Southwest, which now control 80 percent of air passenger traffic. The remaining 20 percent is shared by eight smaller surviving airlines. Not surprisingly, airline employment has fallen from 614,000 in 2000 to 464,000 in 2010.
On New Terrain: How Capital Is Reshaping The Battleground of Class War, by Kim Moody
