Nelli Kambouri
Labour struggles in the Piraeus Port Authority (OLP) are dominated by tactics of controlling the limit between normal hours and overtime as well as occupying and bringing the port to a standstill. The division of labour along gender lines is a direct product of the composition of labour subjectivities that emerged in the docks in the long hours of paid overtime and striking. It may seem that dock work is stereotypically normalised as masculine only because in the past it required strong hands, but most of all it is the ability to work without having family or domestic care responsibilities that determine the gendered division of labour in the Port.
The story of the emergence of these subjectivities is a story of masculine bodies that come together to fight, to endure, to win. These bodies are almost entirely masculine and Greek. There are very few women amongst them aside from those workers who usually occupy marginal administrative positions. And there are no migrants, except for the cleaners employed in the container terminals by sub-contractors of OLP and the Piraeus Container Terminal (PCT) who undertake particular ‘feminised’, undervalued and underpaid forms of work. Some women from the administration have managed to enter and become active in the labour unions, thought typically they perform hybrid and niche roles.
Because feminine and migrant bodies don’t appear as an integral part of labour, the history of the dockworkers’ movement is commonly told as a linear thread of events emblematic of the victories of Greek men against the Greek state or of Greek Dockworker Unions against Greek governments. This narrative begins with the 1929 dockworkers strike in Piraeus, when violent clashes between the dockworkers and the cavalry took place resulting in several deaths, but also in better salaries, control of working hours and paid overtime. The story spans throughout the next decades with more struggles, more strikes and violent confrontations, but also increasingly peaceful labour union negotiations and tactical alliances with leading political parties that end up with the unions achieving a stable, secure relationship with the state and dockworkers enjoying well-paid, public sector jobs with greater security and improved labour rights.
Small incidents break this linearity, bringing silences and marginalisation to the forefront. In the 2000s, a limited number of female workers were hired by OLP to work in the container section of the port. These workers were selected through a public recruitment procedure that gave bonuses to the long-term unemployed and to parents of more than four children, most of whom were women. Initially, these female bodies were chosen because they already performed the conventional gender roles assigned to them as mothers and wives. Gradually, however, they had to be assigned to other specialisations, mostly to work as security and administrative personnel, where special skills are required (knowledge of legislative procedures, practical and organisational skills).
Although they had to start from the beginning, to learn anew and retrain in order to familiarise themselves with complicated terminology and frequent changes in the legal framework, some of these female workers willingly left the container terminal because they believed that this would give them more flexibility to combine work with care. This movement also meant that they lost the possibility to add to their fixed income the additional overtime that they would otherwise get in the long hours on the docks. Time is the most important variable when it comes to gender hierarchies in the port. Female bodies end up doing subsidiary tasks mostly in the passenger section of the port not only because they are seen as weak, but mostly because they lack (or are considered to lack) the indefinite time to commit to tasks. Neither containerisation nor digitisation could radically alter or re-articulate this condition.
Disruption: Masculinities in Crisis
The 2009 strike that began on the 1st of October disrupted the linear story of labour struggles in the Piraeus port. On that day marking the beginning of the 35 year concession of part of the Piraeus container terminal to Cosco subsidiary, PCT – signed during the previous year – dockworkers gathered once again to halt the mobilities of machines, things and people in the port, as they had done so many times in the past. The port was once again brought into a complete standstill. While thousands of containers were trapped, others were forced to be redirected to other ports causing conflicts between the OLP unions, logistics companies, track companies and local businessmen.
The unions declared that the concession was ‘an outright sellout of public property’ and feared that the new container terminal operators would bring large-scale layoffs and the influx of cheap Chinese workers and goods. The strike, however, only succeeded in delaying the operationalisation of Cosco plans and signaled the start of a one month period of negotiations between the government and the PCT management. Union hopes that the newly elected Greek government in November 2009 would freeze the implementation of the concession were proven empty.
Media images of the strikers taken during that period portray almost exclusively male dockworkers carrying flags and banners that demand Chinese capital to leave the Port. Visual remnants of this period can still be found in the port as graffiti, posters hanging in the OLP buildings and as archival material in union blogs and websites. The ‘Chinese go Home’ graffiti still welcomes visitors at the entrance of the OLP Pier I as a reminder of the Greek dockworkers resistance to Chinese capitalism. The Cosco concession signifies a complete collapse of the relation between gender, capital and nation.
Yet there is also a process of self-mocking taking place: feminised and racialised images are posted on the walls as ironic commentaries of the broken relation of gender, capital and nation. One of them portrays a Chinese client who is trying to ‘buy’ a prostitute. She makes the following statement ‘Ok sir, I am a whore and I don’t sell myself. I just rent myself. If you wish to buy something, the port is on sale’. The relationship between feminised (prostitution) masculinised labour (dock work) is reversed as the port enters a process of privatisation. Privatisation is here linked to the threat of the feminisation of labour that is anchored to fears of a loss of sovereignty. Unlike prostitution, the Cosco concession constitutes a ‘sale’ rather than a ‘rent’. The concession establishes above all a threat of a territorial invasion, the construction of a ‘territory within a territory’.
The threat of disorder in the regime of gender, capital and nation is also apparent in another self-mocking joke found on the walls of OLP. When an old man is being asked by a friend why he is in a hurry, he replies: ‘I am going to take the Pakistani citizenship to save the 25 euro entrance fee that the Minister of Health imposed in hospitals’.
The threat of feminisation and racialisation brings the story of dock worker masculinities to a dead-end. While existing employees in the OLP container terminal are able to retain their civil servant status and some of the labour rights that they had won during the past decades, PCT has no obligation under the concession to do the same for its own new recruits. Moreover, centrally imposed austerity measures have practically stopped the recruitment procedures of new dock workers in OLP, as is the case in the entire public sector in Greece, while older generations of dock workers were given incentives to resign. In effect for an undetermined period of time, OLP is in a position where it cannot recruit new dock workers because of the memorandum stipulations for the shrinking of the Greek public sector.
The implication of this dead-end is that PCT through its contracting and subcontracting companies is the only possible employer of new labour in the port. Newly recruited dockworkers will have to accept work without any of the benefits that were previously attached to dock labour. Although some – particularly the older OLP workers – retain part of their labour rights, most dock workers seem to have no choice but to renegotiate their labour relations on an individual basis without any of the former rights that they may have previously enjoyed.
In the context of the economic crisis, masculine bodies tend to become more fragile than in the past. They are exposed to forms of vulnerability that were previously reserved for feminised and racialised subjects in precarious sectors of the economy, such as those of the cleaners or the sex workers. Regimes of gender, class and nation that previously privileged and idealised unionised masculine bodies are now rendering them more prone to victimisation.
Towards a Docile Cyborg
The threat of ‘Chinafication’ is often presented not only as the effect of the Cosco concession but also as the imminent condition of the Greek economy. The term refers to the globalisation of labour that often assumes a global precarious ‘unit’ who is genderless, without race and devoid of agency. Unable to refer back to a history of collective labour struggles, this unit pushes all labour to an impasse as it drags wages down and deprives all workers from hard-won labour rights. Being genderless, this unit can spend unlimited hours working. Emptied of race, this unit can perform any kind of unskilled work, without any labour rights – including fixed contracts, hours or paid overtime. In other words the unit of Chinafication appears to be a timeless and universal subject of capitalist development.
Rather than instituting Chinafied labour, however, the concession seems to have brought to the port only a few Chinese executives and high level officials commanding the PCT hierarchy. Labour in the docks continues to be predominantly Greek and male on both sides of the container terminal and migrant workers remain marginalised and invisible. What prevails, instead, is a sharp generational division between older and younger males that separates the OLP and PCT composition of labour. Although the line separating different generations of male dock workers seems difficult to cross, the borders of gender and race seem impossible to transgress.
Instead of challenging the gendered division of labour, the Cosco concession has reconfigured it in an unexpected way. PCT is increasingly able to recruit younger and more precarious bodies; bodies that become docile under the threat of continuous unemployability. Since it was mainly male dominated sectors (like the construction and ship building industries) that have been hit harder by the crisis, the numbers of available male (especially young) precarious labour becomes vast providing Cosco with far more skilled male bodies than the Chinafication thesis assumes. New PCT recruits are neither genderless nor raceless: they are mostly young, robust, healthy, educated, masculine and Greek.
There is evidence to suggest that this new breed of dock workers is not usually recruited from the surrounding areas, such as Perama, where a large pool of unemployed, working class and poor men who used to work in the ship building industry are concentrated. New PCT dockworkers seem to be selected from different locales for their skills and ability to perform tasks in a digitised labour environment. Rather than physical strength, what seems to determine their employability is the capacity to spend unlimited time at work, completely free from care responsibilities. Another marker of employability is their ability to follow the protocols and procedures of PCT, while refraining from collective and communal labour struggles. The coming together of bodies that produced dock work subjectivities in the port becomes impossible. Rather than Chinafied units, the subjectivities that may emerge from these processes may be said to resemble ‘docile cyborgs’, that is masculine bodies able to transform themselves through their machinic extensions into a labour force devoid of collective labour experiences, rights, demands and even desires.