Innovation and labor in the port industry: A comparison between Genoa and Antwerp

With the advancement of innovation initiatives in the port industry, port labor has fundamentally changed in terms of new tasks, skills required, professional profiles, training, employment relations, work organization, and number of jobs. Current literature often focuses more on the assessment of investments in this particular sector rather than on the evaluation of innovative processes and the interaction with employment issues. In this article, the authors assess the relationship between innovation and employment in the port industry by comparing two distinct case studies—the ports of Antwerp and Genoa—which are characterized by partially common features and different socio-institutional contexts. Based on qualitative research conducted between 2016 and 2019, the comparative study finds that incremental innovative solutions produce a polarized port labor market in both cases, as previous studies assess. Nevertheless, the findings show that, in the case of Antwerp, a mediated and structured bargaining system interacts positively with employment issues and incremental innovative solutions, while in the case of Genoa, a disarticulated and less structured context reflects a weaker ability to influence virtuously the intertwine between innovation and employment.