During times of military conflict, economic crisis, and ecological crisis, states often incorporate logistics hubs, such as ports, into their geopolitical strategies to increase their influence and control over critical infrastructure. This makes port workers indispensable allies in the fight for global solidarity and demilitarization. In their contribution to the “Pluriverse of Peace” series, Janina Puder and Jule Elena Westerheide argue that port workers could also be powerful partners in the ecologically sustainable and socially just transformation of the global economy.
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President Donald J. Trump had barely taken office when he announced his intention to place the Panama Canal under U.S. control to enforce better trade conditions for the U.S., even if it meant using military force. Meanwhile, the U.S. has been increasing military action against the Houthis in Yemen since spring. Due to the war in Gaza, the Houthis have targeted the maritime trade route through the Suez Canal and the Strait of Bab al-Mandab, which is located between Yemen, Eritrea, and Djibouti. By attacking one of the world’s most important trade routes, the militia is causing massive disruption to the global movement of goods, particularly affecting industrialized countries at an economically critical point. Consequently, cargo ships are currently taking an alternative route involving a months-long detour around the Cape of Good Hope. This leads to significant delays, resulting in longer handling times for goods and rising transportation costs. With the recent airstrikes in Yemen, the U.S. is now trying to ‘bomb clear’ the passageway for merchant ships.
Trump’s threatening gestures toward Panama and military operations in Yemen are, to a certain extent, an expression of a historically specific constellation of global competition between states. In this constellation, geopolitical interests in controlling sea routes and the port industry increasingly overlap and manifest militarily as power relations shift within the capitalist world system. These conflicts in logistics also point to a deeper aspect of capitalist commodity production. This aspect is linked to the fundamental importance of space and time, or the sphere of circulation, for the accumulation of capital. Karl Marx was already preoccupied with this aspect.
Logistics and the space-time dimension of capitalism
Marx’s early interest in the transportation of goods and commodities stems from the fact that its development is crucial to the turnover time of capital. In other words, how quickly capital advances for the production of goods determines how quickly it can flow back into production via the sale of produced goods. This feeds into a new production and exploitation cycle of capital (MEW 24: Chapter 14). The closer the sales market is to the production site, the faster the cycle can be completed. However, due to competition and developments in the transportation system, it becomes necessary and possible to open up new, distant markets (MEW 24: 254). This creates new areas of political and economic interdependence.
Pursuing low distribution costs while striving to expand sales implies logistical infrastructures that cross national borders and use air and sea routes. Scarce, spatially unevenly distributed resources used in production, such as energy and materials, also require corresponding transportation systems and branched logistical infrastructures. The logistics sector plays an important role in capital accumulation and the circulation of goods. It is also essential for the social reproduction of society because the supply of food, medical goods, and energy in modern societies depends on logistical infrastructures.
According to Marx’s reasoning, it’s not surprising that logistics has become a core industry of the global market. This is likely one reason the sector has recently been targeted by the U.S. government. At the same time, logistics supply chains have particularly fragile nodes, the control of which is essential for smooth processes. During times of economic crisis and military conflict, states often incorporate logistics hubs into their geopolitical strategies to increase their influence and control them as critical infrastructure. However, logistics is not solely shaped by important capital factions and states; it is always the result of class conflicts.
The social significance of the port industry
For example, labor geographer Andrew Herod focused on the fact that logistics, as the backbone of global capitalism, is always contested. Based on his research on labor disputes in the port industry on the East Coast of the United States, Herod demonstrated how workers, as a collective, exert direct and indirect influence on the socio-spatial restructuring of supply chains and temporalities in logistical networks (2001). Herod’s focus on ports is no coincidence; the port industry represents a focal point where historical conflicts about the reconfiguration of space and time in global capitalism converge. These conflicts arise from the tension between state control, geopolitical interests, and the structural contradiction between capital and labor (cf. Puder/Westerheide in prep.).
With around 90 percent of global goods traffic handled by sea, the port industry is undoubtedly critical infrastructure (ibid.). The cost efficiency of maritime transport results from its favorable space-time ratio. Large quantities of goods can be transported comparatively cheaply and quickly over long distances using huge container ships. However, precarious working and income conditions often prevail on board, making deep-sea transport attractive to capitalist actors due to low labor costs – until shipping companies reach the quayside and encounter better-organized, higher-paid workers (Engelhardt 2020; Puder 2025). The geography of water routes and the port infrastructures adapted to them suggest a natural maritime trade infrastructure, but they conceal the fact that these spaces are technically constructed, politically contested, and crucial for global trade.
Public debates about the port industry usually focus on the interests of nation states and transnational corporations. Port workers’ role as acting subjects is usually overlooked. However, port workers are bearers of power resources that they use in labor disputes to assert their socioeconomic interests. They can temporarily bring entire economies to a standstill. In the past, they have also selectively used their ‘logistical power’ in political disputes.
Work and political struggles in the port
As spaces where globalization is concentrated, ports have always been places of social struggle, with workers playing an important role (Engelhardt 2020). Examples of this include blockades of arms shipments in Sweden and Italy, for example. Work stoppages through which workers have shown solidarity with social movements are not an isolated phenomenon in history either. For instance, numerous port workers and unions in Chile supported the student protests in 2019, sparked by the soaring cost of living and mounting inequality in the country.
Focusing solely on conflicts between state (or state and paramilitary) actors or the interests of transnational corporations ignores the role of workers in the history of the sector’s development. At the same time, such a narrow perspective obscures possible strategies of collective resistance against rearmament and increased geo-economic competition.
Today’s disputes in ports, in which workers and trade unions are openly involved, often primarily concern labor law or operational issues. However, their historical legacy and logistical power point to continuing potential. In the face of escalating and overlapping crisis dynamics, port workers should be considered important social actors for political alliances. Their structural and political importance in transporting goods and commodities, and in supplying the population, makes them indispensable allies for global solidarity and demilitarization. They could also be powerful partners in the ecologically sustainable and socially just transformation of the global economy.
The (social) ecology of the port industry
Many social movements have overlooked ports and their strategically untapped potential. The environmental movement, for example, has developed considerable mobilization potential in recent years but lacks long-term strategic alliances. This is partly because the role of labor as a class issue (Rackwitz 2022) in the fight against climate change and environmental degradation has long been ignored (Pye 2017).
While a strategic alliance between port workers and environmental activists is challenging, it is not impossible. Under capitalist conditions, the ecological and social costs of global logistics affect both societies and nature. Both social and ecological concerns are ignored in the current logistics system. Although sea transport is generally considered more climate-friendly than land or air transport, it is actually driven primarily by a growth-oriented efficiency logic. Mega-ships, which require massive port expansions and river deepening, sometimes operate below capacity and ship empty containers over long distances. Privatization exacerbates this dynamic, as seen in the Port of Hamburg, where shipping companies such as MSC advertise their participation in public port operators with high handling volumes. The result is an expanding, resource-intensive logistics system that considers neither socially nor ecologically sensible flows of goods nor socially just and ecologically sustainable social reproduction.
Clearly, port workers have a legitimate interest in high throughput figures, regardless of the type or destination of the goods traded, because their jobs and wages depend on them. However, this does not imply a general lack of ecological awareness. Rather, the question arises as to how ecological and labor-related interests can be combined to overcome simplistic contradictions.
Towards a social and ecological transformation of the port
The effects of climate change are already evident in the working conditions and processes at the port. Extreme weather conditions, such as low water levels due to drought, can hinder the handling of ships. Heat and storms negatively impact occupational health and safety. The port industry also often has negative ecological consequences that the local population can feel in the form of air pollution or the destruction of sensitive ecosystems (Bloom 2024).
Currently, the ecological consequences of the maritime economy for workers remain largely untranslated politically. In the Global North, the increasing digitalization, automation, and outsourcing of work processes are decoupling work from concrete environmental perceptions. In the Global South, however, the ecological effects are more noticeable, for example, on nature reserves in smaller ports in Chile. However, social and ecological issues have thus far been discussed separately.
Many workers hold on to their jobs at the port for fear of rationalization processes, even if working conditions deteriorate in the long term and the workforce becomes increasingly fragmented. However, this is precisely where a decisive lever lies. Instead of pitting ecological transformation against job security, it is crucial to develop sustainable logistics strategies with employees, trade unions, and ecological movements. This would entail sensibly interlinking different transport routes, strengthening inland shipping, and including programs for further qualifying workers.
This would create ecologically sustainable and socially just transport logistics in the long term, offering stable, well-paid, and meaningful jobs. Such considerations are essential to developing political logistics that view ecological justice and social participation as a shared responsibility, not as opposites. This approach would allow us to view the port not only as a tool of geopolitical and economic interests, but also as a potential site of resistance by workers – as a agents of a better world, perhaps even a pluriverse of peace.
The fun fact is that ships often contribute to bad labour conditions by taking the flags of the global south. However, when vessels get attacked the navy of Liberia and the Cayman Islands is not taking the action. Suddenly, they become German-owned ships and the German tax payer needs to send its expensive navy frigates to protect trade routes in East Africa. The flagging out of the Western trade fleet is like an early precedent to capital’s offshore and sea-steadying visions and globalisation as a race to the bottom. Sailors are paying the price for decades. But actually it is easy to correct the erosion of labour standards by concerted multinational actions on a port level. Also logistics was strongly promoted by the military. My father used the first sea containers for export as a civil return freight of the U.S. army supplies in Germany. Containers were the number one contribution of the military for global trade logistics. Today they are indispensable.
Also there is a climate change aspect to it. Maritime transportation has a significant carbon footprint. Oil transport by sea is environmentally risky and the best mitigation measure is to replace an oil economy. eFuels are an option for the future and still more viable than fusion energy.