Post-Diversity, Precarious Work for all: Unbordering Categories of Difference in an Amazon Warehouse

Abstract

This paper investigates how Amazon manages a diverse workforce in one of its warehouses in Poland. Drawing on critical theory of borders, which emphasizes the key role of bordering in labor governmentality, our analysis identifies four organizational practices through which socio-demographic categories (e.g. gender, age, ability, etc.) traditionally segmenting labor are purposely and effectively dismantled: a non-selective hiring, the algorithmic management of the workforce, social norms of inter-personal politeness between anonymous workers, and casualized employment for all workers. Through these practices, Amazon creates an unprecedented equality within labor, to the advantage of workers belonging to historically subordinate groups in the labor market and society. However, once undifferentiated, workers can more effectively be made to compete, allowing capital to enforce precarious employment conditions onto all. This equalization-with-precarization of the workforce through the un-bordering of socio-demographic categories further rests on multiple other borders at the infra-individual, organizational, national and European Union levels. The paper contributes to the critical diversity literature by showing how, in the ‘post-diversity’ workplace, workers’ equality serves the enforcement of universal precarity.