(Де)субъективация работников в пространстве склада маркетплейса: цифровой диктат или индустриальный «базар»?

ИНТЕРакция. ИНТЕРвью. ИНТЕРпретация. 2022. Т. 14. № 3. С. 55–75.

Старовойтенко А. Д.

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 2021 in the warehousing complex of a large Russian marketplace. Combining neo-Marxist conceptual apparatus with C. Geertz’s notion of ‘bazaar economy’, I attempt to show a complex, at times conflicting relation between formal and informal components of the warehouse labor. The former are associated with various forms of digitally mediated control, ranging from access to warehousing facilities to regulating the workers’ daily output and financial compensation. The latter emerge as a complex constellation of informal practices and are based upon ‘known ignorances’ [Geertz, 1978: 29] as workers regulate each other’s access to scarce resources (‘work’) and information (‘details’).

Keywords: неформальная экономика, informal economy, цифровой капитализм, платформенная экономика, Platform Economy, digital capitalism, этнография труда, warehouse labor, bazaar economics, ethnography of labor, складской труд, базарная экономика