The second pier of the port of Piraeus, which the government-controlled Greek Ports Authority granted as a concession in 2009 to the Chinese state-owned company Cosco, has become a key site for China's economic expansion in Europe. A key aspect of port management is related to the infrastructural facilities and logistics routines that guide its operations. Consider, for example, the Roma families residing in newly built (housing without permits) located on the hillside along the railway line connecting Piraeus to the freight and intermodal terminal currently under construction in Thriassion.
Trojan Horses,
Impossibility of Labour
As for the latter, deregulation can hardly describe the shifts that have taken place in labor market regimes in the last years of the crisis. A leitmotif in historical analysis and fear of the nationalist right and the communist left, constantly linked to. We were in front of the whole recruiting team and she was shaking like a leaf, she couldn't look us in the eye.
Dockworker Masculinities
In the 2000s, OLP employed a limited number of female workers to work in the container section of the port. In the context of the economic crisis, men's bodies are becoming more fragile than in the past. The dock workforce continues to be predominantly Greek and male on both sides of the container terminal, while migrant workers remain marginalized and invisible.
Software, Machines,
Protocols are central to the control of all information and data exchanges that organize the real-time operation of the terminal. In the semi-automated environments of the container terminals in Piraeus, there are different types of protocols in place to control data flows within the terminal operating system and to ensure interoperability with other software systems. Despite their central role in managing these data exchanges, protocols are not critical to the organizing principle of the software-driven promise of continuously increasing productivity coupled with the continuous optimization of container terminal operations.
Through these different logics of order in place in Piraeus, human bodies and labor become appendages to the primary task of controlling machinic behavior. The demand to fix heating and air conditioning in the operator's cabin is simultaneously inscribed in the discourse on optimizing terminal performance, where the workers' demands take optimization to its limits and demand optimization everywhere. Another figure of labor that appears in Piraeus' container terminals is the 'gamer-programmer'.
The actor-programmer usually resides at a desk in the terminal operator's operations department and is the worker most persistently exposed to the graphical user interface of the TOS. A remote operator, however, can easily step into the figure of a game programmer. This brief description of some of the key figures of labor emerging in the container terminals of Piraeus only highlights the limitations of representing social struggle through a human-centered approach.
This line of research will be taken forward in the next phase of Logistical World's project investigation of the Piraeus container terminal site.
The Newly Builts and the
Infrastructures
The debates in the local café of the Nieuwbouw are constantly about one issue: Roma, the 'subhumans' and 'thieves'; the. At the factory, a special technical facilities laboratory provided for the construction of special shelters in trucks for the transportation of the drugs. He lives in the Nieuwbouw with his wife and his four daughters – the youngest is six months old.
According to the statistics from the Western Attica region, at the social grocery store in the municipality of Aspropyrgos, more than 400 families seek food aid at least twice a week. In Nybygget there is the 6th primary school that belongs to Aspropyrgos municipality. Because', he continues, 'the economic status of the parents is very low, children experience violence due to poverty on the one hand and domestic violence on the other.
However, there is an intense reaction from Aspropyrgos municipality against this measure. A conflict between Primary Education of Western Attica and the municipality began, and one day bulldozers looted the Roma settlement in the area. However, the head of the primary school adds that "the problem is more complicated because some Roma families do not want to spread their children in different schools, because the parents are afraid that the children will meet Roma from other areas and families and they will probably get married in unwanted marriages «.
On the eastern side of the new buildings is the last natural water source of the Thriasio area.
The New Ikonion-
It is said that the Persian emperor Xerxes watched the battle of Salamis (480 BC) from one of the peaks of Mount Egaleo, which is included in the Municipality of Perama. The lives of the residents of Ikonio seem to be affected by PCT and its daily operations. Stacks of containers, large quay cranes and tracks going in and out of the piers are the dominant view from this rather precarious settlement.
After a small but intense debate about the poverty rate in the area, the customers of a cafe agreed that about 80% of the population of New Iconium is below the poverty line and they depend on the food distribution that is distributed in the courtyard of St. Paraskevi. Residents of New Iconium still speculate about the motives behind the expansion of Cosco's ship repair yards and the development of the Thriassion Freight and Intermodal Center. In most areas there is a light wire fence along the ends of the railway, probably to prevent animals from entering the tracks.
Are the Roma or those dealing in the scrap business a real danger to the New Ikonion-Threassion line. Local youth have already interacted with the new infrastructure, with graffiti artists putting their own tags on the walls of small tunnels on the line's track. An electrical engineer of the Actor told us in one of our visits that there is a modification in the plans of the original contract.
The change has to do with the realization of the construction of infrastructures to facilitate the logistical needs of the cargo.
Containment
Intermodal freight container dimensions and specifications were standardized in January 1968 and identification markings seven months later. The view of the container port in Piraeus is dominated by geometric stacks of containers and the silhouettes of cranes and their terrifying vertical and horizontal movements through three-dimensional space. The containers are uniform and (much like the little living boxes that Seeger sang about) differ—at least to the human eye—from each other only by their colors and company markings.
The regularity and conformity of the standardized containers are visually very similar to the representation of a hard disk's compartments as depicted in the programs used to defragment them. Here, too, differently colored rectangles are neatly rearranged, without any idea of the nature of their digital content: poems, photos, love letters or invoices. These employees have some hypothetical knowledge of the contents of the containers, encoded on their systems.
So their judgments about how and where to stack are informed by the relative weight of the contents, the container's next destination and whether the contents are considered hazardous or not. Cosco does not allow national or international inspectors to enter their part of the port to physically check the containers. In this Legoland, where standardized containers are redistributed using standardized symbols manipulated by workers with increasingly standardized work processes, whether at the port office, on the pier, on board the ship or on the vehicle that takes them to their next destination, the individuality of the workers . the workers still find an expression.
Fences also keep residents, public sector employees and inspectors away from PCT's private piers.
Metal
Scrappers
Connectivity and Flexibility
Marginalised
Although they represent the end of the chain in the metal industry, the individuals involved in this line of work share some common characteristics with the global corporate actors of Pier II. Many of the local Greek collectors have a history of a variety of professional occupations, of travel and migration. the narratives of the collectors tell stories of flexibility, border crossings and global connections. The image of dirt inherent in the places where the scavengers find the valuable items - the trash cans - is subsequently associated with their work or even the person of the collectors themselves.
However, they also have to adapt to the operation and schedules of related industries. As authorities expand competition rules in favor of the influential Cosco, they increase pressure on small businesses like the scrap industry through tighter controls. According to the research of documentary filmmaker Christos Karapelis, the older generation of scrappers wanted state control to support individual collectors against the arbitrary pricing policy of scrapyards.
Now with the new law we have to check the scrappers' VAT number, address and driving license. As the economic situation of the majority population is constantly declining, the composition of scrappers is changing. When the state fortified its borders as a requirement of the Dublin Treaties, the country became their inevitable detention station.
Labor relations in contemporary Greece are becoming increasingly precarious, but the scrapers are a group at the end of the economic chain that has always been the personification of precariousness.
Concepts
Global logistics industries are key to understanding the new configurations of social technologies and their implications and work regimes. The main task of logistics is to manage the movement of people and goods in the interests of communication, transport and economic efficiency. At the center of logistics is the issue and scope of governance, both for work subjects and for the handling of objects or items.
Their capacity to relate to each other and to adapt to changes over time and circumstances is key to their power as non-state agents of governance. Standards support capital accumulation and political hegemony from the micro level of algorithmic apparatuses to the macro level of global infrastructures. Protocols are the invisible servants of logistics operations that mobilize people, finance and things.
By reducing the world to rules, we ruin our imaginations to overthrow regimes – technological, social, economic, political. With historical precedents of free ports, pirate enclaves, and colonial concessions, zones have multiplied their presence in the United States. Stable regulations, well-developed communication, efficient transport systems and uniform software implementations are the basic requirements for establishing corridors.
Optimization divides the world into levels or orders, selecting or searching for options within hierarchies.
Infrastructure makes
