Untangling Supply Chains

Conversation between supply chain experts talking logistics from Indonesia to New York

The Arteries of Global Capitalism: Supply Chains


Those new touch screen warm cozy gloves you just got have likely lived through off-shore manufacturing, traveled across the seas in shipping containers, visited warehouses, waited around in fulfillment centers.

They are the manifestation of digital automation and often highly gendered global assembly lines. They pump the arteries of global capitalism.

They reflect national, class, and gender hierarchies and vast technological differences, with high profits on one end and precarious labor contracts on the other end.

The management of these complex supply chains is a fine-tuned game of consumer-driven factory orders, data flows, robots, GPS, and digital surveillance.

We have all gone to the grocery store and pushed our shopping carts in front of empty shelves. Before the pandemic, supply chains were the stuff of Amazon, WalMart, technological innovators, CEOs,  economists, and the Wall Street Journal.  Now, they have moved from the shadows into the common parlance of daily life.

This roundtable will confront our reliance on these supply chains and the impact that COVID-19 has had on the workers, profit margins,  and consumers in the global economy.

Supply chains: How do they work?  Why do they matter? Why are they international? Why have they broken down?  



Yasinta Ariesti is a labor policy researcher and international development practitioner who turned into a continuous improvement (CI) specialist in a logistic technology company start-up in Indonesia.

After graduating from University of Warwick, UK, specializing in Politics, Big Data, and Quantitative Method in 2021, she transferred her extensive policy research skills into a systematic approach in order to identify, analyze, and bring about improvement in logistics.

With her first-hand experience in start-up environments, she sees many similarities between working with business on their planning and developing policy briefs.


Shaianne Osterreich is an associate professor of economics at Ithaca College. Her research interests are international trade, poverty alleviation, and gender, and she has been working on/with Indonesia since 2006. In 2005-2006 she was a Senior Fulbright Scholar in Surabaya, East Java, Indonesia.

She is currently working on the linkages between Indonesian manufacturing and the Decent Work agenda, put forth by the ILO and the Government of Indonesia.

In particular, she is looking at the gender differentiated employment effects of industrial variation related to globalization (exports, foreign direct investment, etc.).