Special Issue: Post-diversity, precarious work for all: Unmaking borders to govern labor in the Amazon warehouse

Abstract

This paper investigates the (un)making of borders as a form of labor governmentality in one of Amazon’s warehouses in Poland. Guided by a critical theory of borders as a form of labor governmentality under global capitalism, we identify organizational practices through which socio-demographic categories traditionally deployed as principles of organizing work (e.g., gender, age, ability) are unmade: the management of deskilled labor through an algorithmic system, the non-selective hiring of workers, the enforcement of social norms of inter-personal respect, and a universal system of casualized employment. Together, these practices constitute workers as undifferentiated, interchangeable and equal labor, let them compete with each other under harshly exploitative conditions, and continuously dispose of the least productive among them, keeping all in structural uncertainty. The study contributes to the critical diversity literature by showing a ‘post-diversity’ governmentality that rests on equality, competition and precarization of labor as a whole, rather than segregation and marginalization through an ‘ideal worker’ norm. This labor governmentality operates by eliciting consent from historically subordinated workers and eliminating the advantage of historically relatively privileged ones. Unmaking borders within labor inside the organization, this governmentality at once crucially rests on borders outside it.