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Efficient bodies

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Tom arrived at the sorting centre every Saturday morning at 7 o’clock sharp. Upon arrival he clocked-in, received a handheld and was told on what spot in the

warehouse he needed to work that day. At this spot, he would always find a line of roll containers waiting for him, filled to the brim with parcels. Facing these roll containers, there was a line of empty roll containers with large labels with numbers.

His first task was to, one by one, scan the 3S-barcode on each parcel. For each parcel the handheld displayed a number and Tom placed the parcel on a roll container labelled with that number. When all parcels were sorted into the

numbered roll containers, Tom would receive another handheld from his manager.

With this handheld, he scanned all the parcels again. This time, the handheld showed a different number. Using a permanent marker, Tom wrote this number on the parcel and placed the numbered parcel back on the numbered roll container.

Only after a couple of shifts, Tom realised that no-one explained to him why he was doing what he was doing. He started to wonder where the parcels came from, who had placed the roll containers in a line, what the numbers on the roll-containers indicated, and how they related to the numbers he had to write on the parcels.

The experience of Tom elucidates two important factors that shape the experience of the operational workers in this logistics chain: the closed-off logic of the logistic processes and the interdependency of humans and technologies in the distribution process. For Tom to properly do his job, it was not important to know what the numbers and stickers meant: he does not need to be aware of his position in the logistics chain or understand the logic behind the tasks he is given. Instead, Tom just needs to carefully follow the instructions on his handheld without any mistakes or alterations.

Without knowledge of why they are doing what they do, workers are made dependent on their handhelds to choreograph their every move. Following Taylor´s principles, the workers are reduced to intrinsic parts of the logistics chain—as if they are a metal gear in a machine. In this chapter, I use ethnographic material to make explicit how the logic of the chain is obfuscated and how workers are made dependent on “The System”. Furthermore, I will discuss how this unknowing and dependent position is a technique of digital Taylorism and leads to the deskilling and dehumanisation of workers.

Whereas the first part of this chapter sketches a bleak present (and future), this discussion will be followed by the ways workers use inventive ways and creative strategies to cope with this reality or resist is. Because even when the design of the chain is intended to create unquestioning, docile and obedient workers, that does not mean the workers are.

The logic of the chain

Tom was unaware of the logic behind his sorting task. “Logic” is a concept with many different meanings. Whereas in social sciences it is often used to refer to the rules that

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direct how groups of people operate, in popular vernacular it refers to “being reasonable”. For engineers it refers to the desired path to a goal and the rules that govern this journey.12F12F13 In this context, I refer to “logic” as that which governs the logistics chain: the rules that direct the movement and the way the logistics chain is built up and its parts are connected. This includes not only the human operation, but also the

implementation and use of software, hardware, machines and other materials—the whole sociotechnical assemblage of distribution. In other words, talking about the logic of the chain, I refer to how the links in the chain are interdependently interlinked and a parcel moves through the infrastructures of distribution logistics.

As Tom’s situation elucidated, the logic of the logistics chain is beyond many of the individual workers in an operational position. When Tom asked his supervisor about the process, he did get more information about why he had to write numbers on the parcels and who they were for. Tom was working in the second phase of the sorting process, where parcels that had been sorted per region had to be sorted per scheduled route. The number on the roll container corresponds with the number given to a route assigned to a driver and the number he wrote on the parcel indicated the order of appearance of each parcel. After learning this, Tom said he was quite amazed by the complexity of the whole, but then he started laughing and added that this complex system was “just cut up in a thousand tasks that a monkey could execute”. While he might be part of this complex and exciting whole, in practice, he “…just took a parcel, threw it somewhere”.

In their book The Hidden Injuries of Class, Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb (1972) discuss that through digitalisation, simplification and standardisation work processes have become illegible for workers. They studied bakers that use computer-controlled machines to bake their bread—rendering the physical act of bread baking into monitoring processes via on-screen icons and pressing buttons. Although the bakers know exactly how to operate the baking machines, they no longer know how to bake bread. As a result, Sennett and Cobb argue, the work is no longer legible and the labour becomes abstract. In distribution logistics too, this abstraction shapes the experience of workers. As a consequence, the workers that were in fact inextricably tied to the rest of the chain, often felt detached from the logistic operation. Marlene, for example, when simply discussing her tasks with me, seemed to constantly question and downplay the importance of her tasks. When talking about emptying mailboxes she said:

And then I empty mailboxes. That is, uhh, if that is a nice job I don’t know [laughs]. I don’t know how many people you make happy with that, because there is never a person in that mailbox so.. [laughs].

For Marlene, it was difficult to see how her small task of emptying mailboxes and dropping them off at the depot was a vital part of the delivery process. She never saw

13 Disruption: A Manifesto (logicmag.io) (last visited: 12/06/2021)

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the people at the end of the distribution process or the completion of the delivery.

Marlene is part of the choreographed performance of delivery, constantly repeating a certain set of motions without seeing the complete stage. Thereby the work is

abstracted and loses meaning.

Abstracting the labour process and simplifying it so much that the process as a whole becomes illegible for individual workers, is a manifestation of the implementation of Taylor’s principles of Scientific Management Techniques. These fragmented labour processes, Carol Wolkowitz (2006, p. 58) contends, are “devoid of intellectual content or discretion” and could be done by a “trained gorilla”. Jobs that used to be based on skill, required imagination and intelligence and informed workers that knew what they were doing, in Taylor’s design are reduced to mere mechanical and physical tasks (Yanarella & Reid, 1996; Wolkowitz, 2006). In this design, the motions of workers are not “autonomous or volitional”, Mark Bahnisch (2000) contends, but rather a

choreographed performance (p. 55). Cut up in small and fissured and orchestrated acts, each link moves the parcel a little closer to its receiver without being aware of the whole path the parcels travel.

Whereas Taylorism is often seen as merely technological and administrative management techniques, it is much more than simplifying and cutting up the work. As David Knights and Hugh Willmott (1989) argue, it is also a discursive strategy (p. 544).

In these management techniques, cutting up the work in tiny tasks was also used to obfuscate workers’ knowledge of the chain. Operational workers do not have access—

or rather, are denied access—to the logic of the chain. Here, the emic notion of “The System” also holds an important function in the discursive strategy of Taylorism. While abstract, polyvalent and amorphous, it gives a sense of a larger logic “out there” It presents itself as what Johannes Beetz (2016) calls “supra-human”—"a thing the individuals do not control but are controlled by” (p. 36). By not giving workers

information about why they need to do certain things, but simply demanding they follow

“The System”, it becomes a power-laden field where the bodies of workers can be objectified into a mere “workforce”—a pool of employed bodies. As the process is illegible for the workers, what connects all links and oversees the process are technologies.

Sociotechnical dependency in digital Taylorism

As the logic of the chain is beyond individual workers, the technological actants in “The System” have become leading in the sociotechnical assemblage. Many of my

interlocutors explained they were completely dependent on the technological devices they used during their work. An example of this dependency, is the way they need the handhelds to communicate with an important variable in the logistics flow: the box. All parcels contain one or more labels with information. For a trained eye, these stickers elucidate much about the route the parcel took. In a way, the labels contain the traces of the complete logistics chain.

43 Figure 10: Decoded labels.

As artefacts of the sociotechnical assemblage of distribution, these labels reveal a jumble of information—for both human and more-than-human actants in the logistics chain. A vital code for the logistic process on these labels, for example, are the barcodes (sequenced bars and spaces with varying widths that represent a series numerals and characters), such as a 3S-barcode. These barcodes contain a multitude of information about the sender, receiver, transportation methods and routing. In a way, these codes represent the ID of the parcel. Every time this code is scanned by a device connected to the system, a server in a datacentre registers the exact location of the parcel, and keeps track of its movements. Hence, through these barcodes a parcel is traced throughout the logistic operation.

“Through its label”, Jack Mullee (2020) argues, “the box speaks and is heard in the languages of a flat, networked world”. For workers like Tom, the language of this networked world, the sociotechnical assemblage of distribution, is only made available to him through his “scanner” (handheld), as he explained:

… all these parcels have barcodes, and as a human, well you can look at it, but you have no idea what that barcode means. The scanner translates everything:

what that parcel is, where it needs to go, in which order…

Without the correct labels, the parcels are unable to travel through the logistics chain, as nothing or no-one would know the route it needs to travel—it would just be a box, with

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unknown contents. For Marlene, the cardboard boxes only become a parcel—an object or objects wrapped in order to be carried or sent by post—when it has a label that indicates its planned route and a with a scanner that can read the code. Their handheld functions as the bridge between the parcels and their designed route; through the handhelds the parcels can communicate to the humans and the humans can talk back.

The interaction with the parcels is dependent on technologies and this is not limited to their ability to translate the labels. Technologies are constantly used to guide and monitor the process.

This sociotechnical dependency creates a form of labour control through the techniques of digital Taylorism. By creating illegible processes and designing technological systems that dictate the work, workers themselves are deskilled.13F13F14 The tasks are simplified into clear-cut procedures and tasks that are communicated through a handheld, PDA or headsets. These devices give detailed instructions to the workers of where to go and what to do. When I started working in the fulfilment centre, my handheld showed codes that gave instructions of what to do. With these instructions, I just kept on taking the items and placing them into the boxes until my handheld told me it was the end of the picking round. Then, I handed over your cart to a co-worker, took a new picking cart, scanned the barcode on the cart, and the whole thing started again. In this design, workers are made wholly dependent on their handheld and do not need any insight into the logistic process to perform their jobs. Hence, the technological devices are used to standardise and choreograph the tasks—and in the process deskill the workers.

“Follow the System”: Humans as material

Logistic processes of distribution are characterised by “productivism”, in which human labour is treated as “a mechanical system which could be decomposed into energy transfers, motion, and the physics of work” (Scott 1998, p. 98). Under “productivism”, James Scott argues, “[i]n place of workers, there was an abstract, standardized worker with uniform physical capacities and needs” (p. 99). Inspired by Taylors’ principles,

14 Even though I do think workers are deskilled in the design of the chain, I do not use the term “unskilled” labourers.

Deskilling is a practice does not always create workers without skill: even in the simplest tasks, there are many different skills involved in working with this technology or the practice of saving seconds, something I elucidated in the interlude about dexterity.

Figure 11: An impression of the handheld with the instructions for pickers.

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during a public talk in 1965 sociologist Robert Boguslaw (1965) argued that in production, docility is of vital importance. “Human operating units”, he contends,

“sometimes seek to design their own circuitry”. As an appropriate “safeguard” to avoid humans from “designing their own circuitry”, Boguslaw proposed that workers need to be placed on the “same footing as any other material” in the logistic operation. As he stated, only when humans are controlled units within the production process and “we can think of them as metal parts, electrical power or chemical reactions […] we can begin to proceed with our problems of system design” (1965).

Rendering humans into materials sounds jarring and extreme, but I think Boguslaw perfectly articulated the unsettling developments in the management of logistics labour. Most of my interlocutors explained or elucidated the sense of losing a sense of their humanity while working. They described feeling like numbers, robots or mere mechanical parts within a larger system. Rae talked about her position in the chain as a “tiny, tiny wheel in a machine, that is …. not really made for us”. Similarly, one of the first things Marlene told me when we meet on the phone was that she felt like a

“tool” that was just there for one task, everything within that task was decided for her and she did not need to think about anything beyond that task. Later, she confided in me she did not feel recognised as a “whole person” [NL: “Je wordt niet voor vol

aangezien”]. It seems Boguslaw’s vision has been realised in the design of the logistics chain of delivery.

One of the causes of this experience of dehumanisation is the lack of autonomy.

“The System” is designed to dictate the work. During my training in the fulfilment centre, I was told many times that following “The System” was key to integrate successfully into the logistics chain in place. As I was speaking with Alexandros, an operational manager in a fulfilment centre, about the way he assesses new employees he talked about

“proactiveness” as a key indicator of performance. In response, I asked if inventiveness and the ability “to think for themselves” was part of it too. Alexandros responded:

Alexandros: To think for themselves? […] Well, well, uh, it depends. We never, um, regarding the process itself, it is eh, it's impossible to take initiative.

Naomi: Why?

Alexandros: So if it's things you need to do with your scanner. Um, if you scan something else, you will see an error message. […] Actually it's almost. Yeah. Okay.. It's impossible to take initiative because, uhm, the process is designed like that so you have to do specific things and in the right order

Naomi: And the right order is the order the device gives you?

Alexandros: Exactly. If you're trying to do something different or something you think is going to be okay, then it's not gonna work.

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Alexandros stressed multiple times throughout our conversation that it was of vital importance that workers just do what the scanner (the handheld) tells them to do, only then the logistics chain could function. Similarly, Gijs stressed the importance of

following the handheld when it comes to the order or delivery:

Drivers have to follow their route order, so just the route. They just have to follow the handheld. In the handheld it says: you have to go from there to there, from there to there. So they have to stick to the route order. Some drivers deviate for whatever reason. About that, it has been said: no, that’s not something we can tolerate. Just stick to the order …

Logistic processes are designed to filter out human intervention and the supervisors constantly stress the importance of “following the system”.

The expected obedience to the instructions is the reason my interlocutors felt dehumanised. They also stated that their inability to change things, was one of the biggest frustrations during their work. To them, “The System” is a “black box”, there is no way for them to look inside, talk back, give feedback or dispute the orders. So even when the orders it gives are wrong, illogical or simply do not fit the reality of the road, the workers have to comply. For example, Jade told me about a road she always dreads when it appears on her route. This road is split in two lanes by a slightly elevated grass strip. The route order was based on house-numbers—appearing in ascending or

descending order depending on her point of entry. When she, for example, had a parcel for house 48, 53 and 64, this meant Jade had to run over the grass from one side of the street to another, something highly ineffective and dangerous. Instead, Jade first

delivered 48, 64, turned around and delivered 53. This saved time, energy and was much safer. This route alteration, however, was not accepted by “The System”, and impacted her performance score. Jade had filled out an official form to request a change the route order multiple times, but she received no response. Marlene also stated she was often reprimanded for altering the route, even when she had no other option

because of a roadblock or her alternative route was really more efficient and allowed her to save some precious seconds. When I asked Marlene if she could give feedback or note that something was wrong. She sighed and proclaimed:

Yes, but that is agony, And then still nothing changes. Because yes, they [the supervisors] can listen to you, but from above the guidelines are very clear, so they cannot do anything. They are there because it’s mandatory to be a team leader, but the guidelines are so strict.

All operational workers, also the ones performing management tasks, are bound by “The System”.

For Taylor inventiveness and initiative from workers was one of the biggest risks in the chain. By not following the rules, they could seriously disrupt the designed system.

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Taylor was not completely wrong: failure to comply to orders of “The System” could indeed lead to disruption. The links of the chains are both inextricably bound, and disconnected, and when people do not follow “The System”, or “The System” is disrupted by more-than-human forces, the connection between the links can be lost.

While it is designed in a robust manner, when the humans stop following the orders of

“The System”, and decide to follow their own path, the chain can easily break. Failing to read what a handheld says, scanning the wrong barcode, clicking the wrong button, these simple mistakes can lead to major issues along the chain. Throughout this research, I encountered many disruptions of the logistics chain by human error—

workers misplacing parcels, messing up the inventory or administrative mistakes. In the current design of the logistics chain, it seems vital that humans act like machines:

standardised, predictable and measurable.

Dehumanised into replaceable parts

Rendered material parts of the chain, individual workers are made into replaceable units of labour. Pepijn told me he just felt like a little cog in a machine, recalling his

experiences working in the fulfilment centre, he stated:

Pepijn: … what makes you a human being really gets sucked out of you the moment you walk in there. You really just feel that.

Naomi: How do you feel that and what creates that feeling?

Pepijn: Well you know that you… you're only there because you deliver

productivity, and the moment you do not do that anymore you're out of there. Your only value there is your productivity, and that is just, you are no longer a human or something. You don't stand there as people together, you don’t have any regard for each other [or say]: "hey, how are you feeling today? what do you need?", That never happens, that doesn't exist there. I remember that at some point, in morning after we just had that stand-up, and we went to the place where all the [picking] carts are

[parked], […] A colleague stood next to me said: “Could you get a glass of waterrrrrr" and [while talking] then she fell. She fell into me so I could catch her and guide her to the ground. But yes, she was just completely, I think she hadn't eaten enough or something, or there was something else, but she fainted at the start of her shift. But [after that] I never saw her again […]. Because yes, of course, there is no use to someone who faints at the start of the shift.

Pepijn felt dehumanised because he was made replaceable. The bodies of these workers are reconstructed into efficient parts and embedded in the existing logistics chain. To put it bluntly, a logistics chain is not dependent on humans per se, but on efficient bodies. Efficient bodies are those bodies that can operate the technological