The Labour Factor: The Docks of Trieste and Koper through the Global Crisis

The research reconstructs the history of the ports of Trieste and Koper before, during, and after the years of the global economic crisis, placing them in their national contexts. The crisis, which in many economic sectors have drastically reduced the number of companies and employees, has reinforced a change already underway in the ports with regard to workers’ tasks and skills. In fact, the increasingly massive use of containers, the development of mega ships and the European competition regulations have influenced working times and the greater use of ‘uncertain’ labour. In ports, the decrease in workforce and the dissolution of port communities with a progressive removal of the port and the reference territory had already taken place. However, precisely during the years of the crisis, the struggles undertaken within the ports for the stabilization of ‘uncertain’ workers and for improvement of safety and working hours brought the port closer to its citizens. In the cases considered, ports and territories have started talking to each other again, but in a different way from previously. The fracture between before and after, linked to all the conditions and factors that have been investigated in this research, is also of an ideological character. In fact, those groups of workers, strongly characterized from a political point of view that once represented the connection between inside and outside, have been lost. This is a process that has just begun, not without opacity and ambiguity, but it is nevertheless helping to convince local communities to experience the port and its structures, not as a burden, but as a driving force for the local economy.