Still waiting, still moving: On labour, logistics and maritime industries

Driving past stacks of containers organized in long rows arranged in grid-fashion, the impression of lonely canyons of buildings in a city’s finance district is distinct. Yet this is no business precinct in some anonymous city, but Beilun Port, one of China’s largest shipping hubs near the city of Ningbo, which is located a few hours south of Shanghai - the nearest competing deep-water port. We arrive at one of four loading docks. A few massive ships are lined up alongside container cranes. What’s striking is the seeming absence of workers. For one of the biggest ports in the world, there was surprisingly little activity - not a lot of movement of containers, and very few workers. But perhaps this shouldn’t be such a surprise - financial news reported on the savaging of the shipping industry in the first six months of the global economic crisis: shipping companies were collecting 75-80 per cent less on the cost of transporting containers; charter rates plunged to levels that no longer return profits, reproducing the falls in freight rates; smaller shipyards across China were abandoned, with half-finished ships never to be built; inventories of iron ore, electronics, textiles and sports shoes were among the many commodities piling up in the ports across China, with no market destination.1 Clearly, if you ever wanted to move goods across the oceans, this was the time to do it with prices so low.