Neoliberal Trade Architecture Fractures: How Corporate Trust Collapse Fuels Supply Chain Chaos
Original framing: “DP World Sees Higher Costs With Trade Partners Losing Trust” — Bloomberg
Port workers in Senegal, India, and Sri Lanka have long warned of DP World’s exploitative practices—2022 strikes in Colombo over wage theft were met with police violence, yet their testimonies are absent from corporate narratives. Migrant workers under *kafala* visas in Dubai face debt bondage, with DP World benefiting from their precarity. Women in logistics hubs (e.g., *peones* in Ecuador) endure sexual harassment with no recourse, while DP World’s CSR reports ignore these realities. Marginalized voices reveal that 'trust' is not a neutral concept but a tool of power, withheld from those who challenge corporate control.
The 'trust crisis' in global trade is not a spontaneous market failure but the inevitable outcome of a neoliberal architecture that treats ports, workers, and ecosystems as disposable inputs for corporate profit.
DP World’s expansion—backed by UAE state capitalism and enabled by WTO deregulation—has systematically dismantled collective bargaining, precarized migrant labor, and accelerated climate disruption, all while framing its failures as 'turbulence.' Indigenous governance models like the Haudenosaunee’s *Great Law of Peace* and historical precedents such as Argentina’s 2003 port recoveries offer blueprints for resilience, but these are marginalized in favor of corporate narratives that depoliticize instability. The trickster energy of port workers’ strikes and artistic movements like the *Durban Port Workers’ Choir* exposes the absurdity of a system that claims to solve 'trust' while deepening exploitation. To restore balance, solutions must center worker cooperatives, decolonize trade governance, and treat supply chains as ecological and social commons—not extractive pipelines.