(De)subjectivation of Workers in the Marketplace’s Warehouse Space: Digital Dictate or an Industrial “Bazaar”?

Abstract

Despite the enormous amounts of human resources engaged in warehousing, warehouse labor remains virtually invisible to the public, both among consumers and in the academia. A lot of research is dedicated to the transformation of labor relations within platform economy, including precarity and “uberization” of labor, as well as digital technology-mediated surveillance and control over employees during working hours. At the other “pole” are numerous studies on the informal (“garage”) economy. This article is based on a 1.5-month ethnography I conducted in the summer of 2021 in the warehouse complex of a prominent Russian marketplace. Engaging in a dialogue with both “poles” mentioned, my observations in the warehouse suggest the simultaneous coexistence of two realities. The first deals with various forms of digital control of employees, ranging from access to the workspace to the regulation of output and eventual earnings. The second is predominantly informal and is based on the deliberate restriction of workers' access to “rare” resources (“work”) and information (“details”). Here I attempt to show the complex, at times conflicting interaction of formal and informal components of warehouse labor, combining the neo-Marxist conceptual apparatus with the metaphor of C. Geertz's “bazaar economy”.