Labour As ‘Residue’: Unpacking Client-Appeasing Technology Fetishism in Warehouse Fantasies of Seamless Logistics

The pursuit of “seamless logistics” – a vision of perfect, uninterrupted global supply chains – is increasingly facilitated by the widespread adoption of digital Taylorist principles in warehouses. Algorithmic management systems optimise operations, automate labour coordination and impose unprecedented levels of micro-surveillance. Research indicates that these digital technologies have fundamentally transformed warehouse operations, resulting in heightened workloads, diminished worker autonomy, and deskilled work, enabling the further casualisation of employment.

This study aims to deepen our understanding of digital Taylorism in warehousing by examining how this reorganisation of the labour process redefines meaning and value of labour. We argue that algorithmic technologies and casual employment not only control labour in new, highly coercive ways, but also fundamentally reconstitute it as the ‘living residue’ in the fantasy of fully automated seamless logistics that meet client demands.

We theorise this fantasy and its production of labour as human residue through Žižek’s theory of the fetish explaining subjects’ “refusal-to-know”. Drawing on Freud, he theorises that subjects recognise harsh realities but continue to act as though they are unaware. Fetish-objects enable such “divided attitude”, as they symbolically embody the phantasmatic, and more desirable, version of reality the subject should have abandoned.

Our analysis is mainly based on in-depth interviews with various types of managers in three Belgian warehouses using different digital technologies, triangulated with interviews with other actors and complementary data. Preliminary analysis indicates that, independent of its specific material features, digital technology operate as a fetish embodying the fantasy of fully automated, seamless warehousing freed from all living labour. This fetish sustains the disavowal of the harsh reality of management’s dependence on labour for keeping warehouse operations running. It moreover underpins narratives of labour as residue, at once less than human and less than machine, that justify control, casualisation and – ultimately – elimination.