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We are all replaceable: Workplace control and (digitalised) surveillance in logistics warehouses

Crime, Law and Social Change

Published online on

Abstract

{"p"=>"In recent decades, the logistics sector has come to play an increasingly central role in advanced economies. From agrifood to e-commerce, the logistics warehouse (or ‘fulfilment centre’) serves as an essential site for the circulation and distribution of goods and commodities within the ‘global factory’. At the same time, given its prominence within the contemporary economic system, the sector has also been a key site for evolving labour management regimes and the advancement of new forms workplace control: accelerated production norms, increasing digitalised surveillance, and labour deskilling through automation—with the aim of ever-increasing productivity and profit. For workers, however, these new forms of workplace control and surveillance may also translate into new forms of abuse, precarity, and social harm. Focusing on the Netherlands—a major ‘distribution country’ and one of the most important logistics hubs in Europe—this paper draws on ethnographic participant-observation conducted in the logistics sector. Through observation of the labour process and conditions on the work floor itself, it examines the nature of these new forms of workplace control and surveillance. Situating the analysis within the framework of a ‘criminology of work’, it examines their impact on workers by exploring how these labour management practices translate not only to more physically demanding and intensive working conditions, but also broader experiences of psychological stress, alienation, and dehumanisation for workers. These findings are situated within wider theoretical debates on emergent forms of labour management within the contemporary workplace."}