Logistics, Labor, and the Struggle Against Amazon

The City as Supply Chain: Fast Circulation, Slow Violence, and Urban Futures

Since its founding in 1994, Amazon.com has expanded into one the largest tech and retail companies in the world. In the process, it has entirely remade global capitalism, reaching all the way from factory spaces in China to the doorstep of our homes, transforming urban peripheries into a dense network of distribution centers, and creating a new logistics working class. How did Amazon reach this position of domination in the global economy, and what are Amazon workers doing to fight against it?

In this talk, titled "The City as Supply Chain: Fast Circulation, Slow Violence, and Urban Futures" co-organised by the DIGIPORTS research team at Erasmus University, Professor Charmaine Chua traces Amazon’s unique capacity to control and coordinate a vast logistics network by combining logistics, retail and digital services into a single corporate entity, allowing it to extend market domination over massive global supply chains. Drawing on her experience organizing with Amazonians United in California, her talk will also examine how this domination is being resisted by Amazon tech workers and warehouse workers building momentum and solidarity by waging united demands around climate justice, healthcare access, and resistance to the military and prison industrial complex.

About Charmaine Chua
Charmaine Chua is a Singaporean organizer and writer, and Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her interdisciplinary scholarly and political work is interested in how planetary networks of production and distribution shape the organization of racialized and class divisions within capitalist social formations, with particular attention to how these divisions are lived, contested, and overcome across anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist social movements. She is currently writing two books, The Logistics Counterrevolution: Fast Circulation, Slow Violence and the Transpacific Empire of Capital, and How to Beat Amazon: The Struggle of America's New Working Class (co-authored with Spencer Cox). Her work has been published in The Review of International Studies, The Socialist Register, Theory and Event, Antipode, Society and Space, The Boston Review, The Nation, and Jacobin, among other venues. She co-founded the Marxist Institute of Research and organizes with Cops off Campus and Amazonians United, an independent union of Amazon warehouse workers. She was named a 2023 Freedom Scholar and is the 2023-23 winner of the UCSB Plous Award.

Programme

18:30 Doors open

19:00-19:15 Welcome by the Independent School and introduction by DIGIPORTS

19:15-20:00 Talk by Charmaine Chua on Logistics, Labor, and the Struggle Against Amazon

20:00-20:30 Conversation with the audience

20:30 Drinks at the bar

About DIGIPORTS 
DIGIPORTS is a research project based at Erasmus University Rotterdam running from 2022 to 2027. DIGIPORTS focuses on how the digitalization of container shipping is reshaping racial and labor inequalities in Rotterdam, Shanghai, and Los Angeles. Combining critical logistics and algorithm studies, the project studies the on-the-ground implementation of digital infrastructures to better understand how it is reconfiguring processes of racialization, and the displacement, classification, criminalisation, and precarity of work. The DIGIPORTS team is Jess Bier (Principal Investigator), Jessica Steinman (Post-Doc), Krista King (PhD), and Miriam Matthiessen (PhD). 

DIGIPORTS (101039641) is supported by the European Research Council.