Piraeus, the biggest port in Greece, has become a strategic link in the Chinese infrastructural expansion strategy, the so-called “Belt and Road initiative”. Under a complex historical conjuncture involving a variety of stakeholders, from the European Union- European Central Bank- International Monetary Fund “troika” that imposed extensive privatization projects in crisis-ridden Greece, to China’s long term strategy to bridge the infrastractural gap between maritime trade routes that could facilitate the circulation of its products westward,the port of Piraeus was gradually privatized and sold to chinese interests during the 10’s, growing into a major player in container handling. For various agents such as trade unions, academics and activists, the concession signifies a shift from state control to “foreign interests”, by turning the port into a Chinese enclave in isolation from Greek reality and a logistical heterotopia comprised of universal logistical terrors, such as deregulated labor and hi tech new disciplinary mechanism (eg. The amazonification thesis). Drawing data from a 6 months fieldwork in Piraeus among dockworkers, as part of my PhD within the ERC-funded project PORTS, I will argue that the levels of labor deregulation, labor docility as well as resistance in the port can hardly be understood through universal patterns of labor policies and technologies in logistics. I will show how historical specificities, neighborhood-level dependencies and employment strategies based on different levels of loyalty to different stakeholders shape the labor worlds in the container terminals of Piraeus.
