Positional Power and Port Centrality: An Investigation into Logistics Work in U.S. Port Complexes

The logistics industry is powerfully positioned between the systems of global production and exchange, which makes it an industry where workers are theorized to possess great positional power due to their brokerage roles in global economic activity. Using both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, I investigate: 1) determinants of individual wages among a wide geographic sample of logistics workers (Chapter 3); 2) the effect of port centrality to the global economy on individual wages of logistics workers (Chapter 4); 3) how the brokerage power of the logistics industry is realized and understood by lower-end logistics workers (Chapter 5). In Chapter 3, I use regression analysis and find that logistics work, particularly for workers on the bottom of the occupational hierarchy, is a constrained industry, where few avenues to mobility and advancement exist as a means to better one's economic situation. In Chapter 4, I use a two-level hierarchical linear model and find that logistics wages vary across ports that handle the most cargo traffic, but that port centrality does not have a specific effect on wages. In Chapter 5, I use rich interview data and find that workers' structural positions and cultural resources, particularly their organizational ties to the global economy and labor unions, as well as their understandings of the benefits of collective action, work together to produce distinctive variations in how logistics workers conceive of the sources and potential uses of their workplace power. Taken together, this dissertation provides a comprehensive study of how wage dynamics and brokerage power operate in the logistics industry, at two levels of analysis and with both quantitative and qualitative data.