Today’s global economy relies on the steady flow of goods, products, and raw materials around the world. Companies like Amazon have become so massive that they now ship as many as four hundred packages per second. But this all depends on the labor of millions of workers in docks, warehouses, and logistics centers. If the global supply chain is broken, capitalism grinds to a halt.

This “logistics revolution” has opened up both new fronts and unique challenges in worker organizing. If the labor movement and the Left want to take advantage of it, they’ll have to understand both its global implications and shop-floor realities.

With this in mind, Chris Browne of the Pluto Books podcast Radicals in Conversation spoke to some key researchers and organizers in the field: Jake Alimahomed-Wilson, professor of sociology at California State University, Long Beach and co-editor of Choke Points: Logistics Workers Disrupting the Global Supply Chain; Katy Fox-Hodess, a lecturer in work, employment, people, and organizations at the University of Sheffield; and Kim Moody, a founder of Labor Notes and the author of numerous books on US labor, most recently On New Terrain, and a visiting scholar at the Centre for the Study of the Production of the Built Environment at the University of Westminster.