I hadn’t anticipated the heat. One expects a logistics warehouse to be cavernous, imposing, even noisy—the constant rumble of carts blending with the whir of conveyors. But the warm air sticking to my skin in this Amazon fulfillment center, kicked out by the heavy sorting machinery lining the warehouse floor, takes me unawares. I have been led to the top of a pick tower, marshaled in a pack alongside other visitors by brightly adorned Amazon “associates,” to begin a public tour of the journey of an Amazon parcel. It is here that workers traipse up and down aisles of randomly shelved goods, scan guns in hand. Also known as portable data terminals, they are attached to workers’ wrists by a cord. Whether designated as stowers, pickers, or packers of the consumer items that fill the warehouse, workers here share the repetitive practice of scanning barcodes—on goods, shelves, packages—using handheld devices fitted with screen interfaces that simultaneously give instructions and measure each worker’s productivity. In the tower, I see pickers stalk the bays, scan guns strategically positioned between their line of sight and the shelves. Once they have located and scanned the item, recently ordered online by a customer, they drop it into a large box on a trolley. When full, the boxes make their way along polished rollers to one of the many packing stations visible from the tower, each well stocked with familiar brown cardboard, before assembled packages are sent to the automatic labeling machine and then onto an enormous mechanized conveyor, equipped with bright red shuttles, that send the parcels down one of a number of chutes depending on their destination.
Speaking to us over a radio set—the noise is too loud to be heard at a conversational volume—our tour guide says: “Amazon is proud that, frequently, among those attending the tours at this flagship site are managers from rival logistics companies.” She cites Amazon’s desire to “Work hard. Have fun. Make history,” recalling the motto that hangs high above the staff entrance to the warehouse, with a prideful emphasis on the word “history.” She wants attendees to take inspiration away from this experience, to implement the methods they see here far and wide in new locations across the country. Since no one has asked why I’m in attendance, I have not mentioned my twin motivations. One is professional—I am a researcher and writer, and I have traveled a long way to get a glimpse of the fulfillment center’s inner workings. But the other is personal—ten years prior, I myself was sorting goods in a retail warehouse on the edge of my deindustrialized hometown. I remember exactly how it looked; I had forgotten the heat. Today, highly computerized operations like this one, a far cry from the tin can of a warehouse I once worked in, are being replicated across brownfield sites almost as fast as the land can be allocated.1 Where the steelworks once gave work to the neighboring towns, the algorithmically tracked labor regime of the logistics sector is now billed as the road to regeneration.
My hometown is Barnsley, in South Yorkshire, northern England. Between it and the nearby towns of Doncaster and Rotherham, distribution hubs for companies like Amazon, Asos, Tesco, and Lidl punctuate the landscape. They are serviced by big roads without streets, upon which lorries and vans travel to and from the M1 and A1(M) motorways and buses ferry logistics workers from the nearest towns and villages. Economically and socially, this region is afflicted by the ongoing deindustrialization of northern towns and small cities that once depended on key industries.2 Deep underfoot, the coal mines that once gave the area an industrial and civic heritage lie buried. Roundabouts and warehouses now crown sealed shafts where headframes—the tops of mine shafts—once stood.
Coal mining organized the lives of this area’s residents from the earliest stages of the Industrial Revolution. In the early nineteenth century, entire families would share a single candle, working the majority of the day in a single tunnel, picking and ferrying lumps of coal from narrow seams hundreds of feet below the surface. The year 1889 brought about the founding of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, which became the National Union of Mineworkers by the end of the Second World War. The NUM went on to become the most powerful union in the country. By translating the tough conditions shared by those underground into a steadfast culture of solidarity that permeated through regional society, the union improved working conditions in the mines and drove up pay. The rhythms of everyday life reflected those of minework: three times a day, workers from the nearest town or village came on shift in continuous rotations, each cohort competent in all the skills necessary to produce coal and bring it safely to the surface. Off-shift, local institutions such as miners’ welfare clubs opened spaces for socializing and discussing politics, at least for white workers—many clubs barred Black workers and workers of color from entering.3 Members also frequented these clubs for leisure, learning, and weekly activities such as cricket, dancing, and brass band practice.4 Some clubs even featured swimming pools.5 Eventually, such was the union’s industrial strength—wholly underpinned by its relevance to everyday life—that it became instrumental in toppling Conservative prime minister Edward Heath during the labor struggles of the early 1970s. Unbeknownst to the miners at that time, this event would lead directly to a campaign of retribution enacted by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, provoking the longest and most belligerent strike in British history—and its defeat.6 Socially and economically, much of South Yorkshire would simply never recover from the miners’ strike of 1984–85.7 Forty years on, the land on which it was fought remains crucial to the prospect of renewal for its surrounding towns.
Yet the economic reorganization of northern England has changed the temporal logic of working life. Whereas workers entering the mines to pick coal could expect a job for life, inside today’s warehouses, any certainty for the future is reduced to a matter of seconds. Governed by algorithmically enabled performance targets, workers pick and pack goods against countdown timers designed to ensure peak productivity at every moment. Enforcing this regime is the fact that these workers are typically employed on insecure contracts or through agencies; many companies operate on a “three strikes” policy for missing targets, which leads to the “release” of workers without hesitation.8 Pickers walk long distances, working quickly to keep pace. Packers, though stationary, must learn to optimize the construction of cardboard boxes and the packing of items.
Whereas workers entering the mines to pick coal could expect a job for life, inside today’s warehouses, any certainty for the future is reduced to a matter of seconds.
The archetypal instrument of the algorithmic regime within logistics work is the scanner, or scan gun, which ensures goods, orders, and workers are connected via ubiquitous barcodes. Examples include the Motorola WT4000 series, a wrist-mounted terminal complete with a finger-mounted “ring scanner,” and the Motorola MC3000, a handheld gun-style scanner I spot in use at the Amazon warehouse. The MC3000’s interface instructs workers where to go and what to pick, and features a timer alongside the worker’s pick rate, which is calculated in real time. Instantaneously, order data is transmitted from the system to the worker, productivity data is transmitted from the worker to the system, and performance data is transmitted back to the worker, all via a device weighing about 14 ounces and assigned to an individual worker. Crucially, this feedback loop reorganizes shop-floor power relations in all directions; while workers remain atomized from one another, only ever becoming well acquainted with the display of the scan gun, even supervising managers lack insight into the algorithmic system. The result is that managers are distanced from both the work process and the calculations of the algorithm—which they are quick to anthropomorphize, as though it has its own intentions—injecting plausible deniability into the dehumanizing logic of the system and denying the possibility of accountability, to the obvious benefit of the employer.
The real-time production and analysis of data makes the modern scan gun integral to logistics. It provides a means of organizing the physical movement of goods and people through space, optimizing travel routes through the warehouse to save time and prevent any more interaction than is necessary to the work. Amid the tall shelving stacks of the Amazon pick tower, workers seldom occupy the same aisle at the same time, so that they are not in each other’s way. The result is work that is devoid of sociality and often lonely. If the ability to form social relationships is a prerequisite of building common cause, here its very possibility is curtailed by a highly engineered isolation. The primary communication within the contemporary distribution center occurs not between workers, or even workers and managers, but between the device and the worker through the former’s close tracking of the activities of the latter. This form of communication is a software-ized, automated means of calibrating physical processes for temporal efficiency and organizing human labor as seamlessly as the fulfillment of consumer orders. Within just-in-time logistics,9 bottlenecks are especially bad for business. As such, the algorithmic system underpinning the warehouse assigns instructions based on minute calculations of timing, ensuring the right order is assigned to the right worker at the right time.
As the militant theorist Raniero Panzieri noted in the 1960s, workers by their nature introduce uncertainty into what might otherwise be considered a finely tuned calculus for making money.10 Algorithmic management, like other forms of management, aims to achieve “certainty of result,” to use Panzieri’s phrasing. Unlike other forms of management, however, it aims to do this in real time and without the direct supervision of human managers—who would only slow things down. Through its repetitive operations and relentless performance management, the scan gun embodies the organizing principles of the algorithmically managed warehouse. The scan gun reduces workers to their data terminals and produces a constructed sense of “flow” by configuring their behavior in line with a logic of temporal discipline, limiting their horizon to the next twelve seconds or so in which they have to find and scan an item or pack and scan a parcel. The scan gun—by screening any knowledge of the wider workflow, let alone the wider workforce, from the worker—becomes the means through which the worker becomes hyper-individualized, highly alienated, and controlled. In this land of scan guns, mounted atop the ground that produced the class power of the past, workers are robbed of their collectivity in real time.
*
The Amazon warehouse and a coal mine share the characteristic of heat. A surprising reality of life in the modern coal mine was the state of undress in which many miners worked. Mines are dirty, dusty, muddy and—owing to the heavy machinery—very, very hot. Miners in the Yorkshire coalfield would often wear bright orange vests that were practically made of string or see-through netted shorts. There are stories of some miners even choosing to mine naked save for their mandatory hardhats. Former miners have told me that it only added to the esprit de corps. Coal dust would cover miners’ bodies so thoroughly that, in the 1980s, teenage boys would be paid to stand in the communal showers with large brushes to scrub the men down as they washed. Black lung, also known as coal workers’ pneumoconiosis, a disease that can lead to necrosis of the lungs, affected many, in addition to industrial diseases like vibration white finger.11 If the health impacts of minework seem a far cry from those of today’s grey distribution hubs, it is worth noting that in 2015, a BBC investigation found that over the course of two years, ambulances had been dispatched to retailer Sport Direct’s logistics complex in Shirebook—a former colliery town—on calls classified as “life-threatening” thirty-six times.12 And in 2021, the Mirror reported that in three years, ambulances at nine regional health trusts had been dispatched to Amazon warehouses 971 times for calls including a suicide attempt and a death.13 During the COVID-19 pandemic, the warehouse of e-commerce site Asos was labeled a “cradle of disease.”14
In exchange for the dirty (and often disabling) work they performed, miners could expect job security and were, in fact, paid well. The NUM and miners’ industrial militancy proved an effective bulwark against the degradation of wages and conditions throughout much of the twentieth century—a record today only preserved within British trade unionism by the rail unions. The same cannot be said for today’s warehouse workers. One worker I spoke to is employed through an agency and assigned shifts by SMS purely on the basis of his productivity metrics; others are subject to short-notice “flexing” of their shifts, an extension or foreshortening of their paid time on the basis of projected business needs, which are in turn subject to live calculation.15 In the past, towns like Barnsley, Doncaster, and Rotherham were not prosperous in the outward-facing sense, but they were internally rich, with a strong social fabric and local identity. Perhaps most significantly, these towns possessed an innate understanding of their place and role within British society—that of the “northern industrial powerhouse,” an idea later invoked by opportunistic politicians.16 Today, beset by economic deprivation, inequality, and rising social reactionism, it is as if they are still in mourning.17
To understand why, it is important to say that perhaps more than any other industry, coal mining in England did not simply produce jobs; it organized the social and economic life of the towns that produced its workers for centuries. In Grimethorpe, a small mining town within the Barnsley borough, the 1981 census recorded that 88 percent of working-age men were miners. In 1993, the colliery there closed, and within years it became one of the poorest areas in the European Union. Like so many settlements in South Yorkshire, mining was the reason Grimethorpe existed, and both the pit and the NUM were central to its civic life. Today, Barnsley is among the top ten most anxious and depressed boroughs in the country, as measured by antidepressant prescriptions; nine of the ten are former mining areas.18 The borough’s primary employer is now Asos, a fast-fashion retailer whose main logistics hub sits atop another former colliery two miles away from Grimethorpe. Along with other distribution centers in the area, it contributes to an entire industry of low pay, tough conditions, and brutal, algorithmically governed discipline. Like mining, it has become the default sector in which to work—and the fact it is always firing means it is always hiring. This is how I myself came to work in the distribution center of a high-street clothing chain at age seventeen. There, I met whole families working on the same production lines and to the same performance targets.
*
The defeat of the miners’ strike was long enough ago that the vast majority of workers who were part of the unions that waged it are now retired. Towns that were once organized along collectivist lines have grown fractured and unequal, offering all-too-easy footholds for far-right opportunists like Nigel Farage and his party, Reform UK, to stoke racist and xenophobic fears.19 The atomization of deindustrialized societies in towns robbed of economic futures, coupled with growing numbers of asylum seekers, has led to conditions ripe for racist outbursts of violence—as evidenced by the mob attacks in the region in 2024.20
In the retail warehouses where increasing numbers of people in the South Yorkshire coalfields now work, the prospect of reversing this trajectory seems elusive. The logistical system constructs and disciplines time, acting against workers continuously—both within the warehouse and outside it. As media theorist Ned Rossiter notes, “The possession of time … is the condition of possibility for the organization of labour.”21 In the name of efficiency, logistics strips workers of their time and therefore their ability to organize. The emergence of distribution hubs across former coalfields has not only seized the abundant brownfield land where collieries once were, but capitalized upon the defeat of the working class power that defined entire towns and generations.
The logistical system constructs and disciplines time, acting against workers continuously—both within the warehouse and outside it.
*
Not long after visiting the Amazon warehouse, I drive through South Yorkshire along a major road running through a zone that would once have been bustling with the surface activity of coal mines. I approach a roundabout named for the colliery that used to exist here; today, it serves an e-commerce warehouse, and the advertising boards adorning its circumference promote a major trade union. Recently, this union was decisively shut out from the area after years of trying to organize warehouse workers there.22
The grim irony of Amazon’s stated intention to “make history” is its implied promise of a better future. More mordantly still, it echoes the historical motto of the NUM, which adorned the banners once held aloft by miners: “The past we inherit, the future we build.” In the lands of the scan gun, that future has been cut short.
1. In the UK, “brownfield” refers to land that was previously developed—particularly for industry—but is now disused.
2. Craig Gent, “The Deindustrial Divide: Why Northern England Is a Political Problem,” Novara Media, October 6, 2021, novaramedia.com.
3. Camilla Schofield, “In Defence of White Freedom: Working Men’s Clubs and the Politics of Sociability in Late Industrial England,” Twentieth Century British History 34, no. 3 (September 1, 2023): 515–51.
4. Norman Dennis, Fernando Henriques, and Clifford Slaughter, Coal Is Our Life: An Analysis of a Yorkshire Mining Community (London: Tavistock, 1969).
5. Grace Shaw, “Whatever Happened to the Miners’ Welfare?,” BBC, November 13, 2014. bbc.co.uk.
6. Seumas Milne, The Enemy Within: The Secret War against the Miners, 4th ed. (London: Verso, 2014).
7. Jem Bartholomew and Clea Skopeliti, ‘‘‘People Have Lost Faith’: Life in Former Mining Towns 40 Years on from the Strike,” Guardian, March 7, 2024, theguardian.com.
8. Craig Gent, Cyberboss: The Rise of Algorithmic Management and the New Struggle for Control at Work (London: Verso, 2024).
9. Just-in-time logistics is an approach to reducing “waste” in order to maximize efficiency and profit. It is a logic applied to space, time, and labor. See also Craig Gent, “When Logistics Run Out of Time,” Novara Media, March 23, 2020, novaramedia.com.
10. Raniero Panzieri, “Surplus Value and Planning: Notes on the Reading of ‘Capital,’” in The Labour Process and Class Strategies (pamphlet) (n.p., Conference of Socialist Economists: 1976).
11. Vibration white finger, also known as hand-arm vibration syndrome, is a condition caused by using vibrating handheld machinery such as drills. It produces numbness, tingling, loss of dexterity, loss of circulation, and in extreme cases loss of the affected fingers. These symptoms arise from damage to the nerves, blood vessels, muscles, and connective tissue in the hands.
12. “Sports Direct site ‘called ambulances dozens of times,’” BBC News, October 4, 2015, bbc.co.uk.
13. Louie Smith and Alexa Phillips, “Amazon Workers ‘Treated Like Slaves and Robots’ as Ambulances Called to Centres 971 Times,” Mirror (UK), November 23, 2021, mirror.co.uk.
14. Sarah Butler, “‘Cradle of Disease’: Asos Warehouse Staff Reveal Coronavirus Fears,” Guardian, March 30, 2020, theguardian.com.
15. Gent, Cyberboss.
16. Craig Gent, “The Tories’ Northern Legacy Is Disillusionment and Division,” Novara Media, July 2, 2024, novaramedia.com.
17. Gent, “Deindustrial Divide.”
18. Dan Hayes, “Why Is Barnsley One of the Most Anxious and Depressed Parts of England?,” Sheffield Tribune, December 10, 2022, sheffieldtribune.co.uk. See also Joseph Rowntree Foundation, “‘Anxiety Nation?’ Economic Insecurity and Mental Distress in 2020s Britain,” November 10, 2022, jrf.org.uk.
19. Craig Gent, “In the North’s Leave-Voting Seats, Disillusionment Is Labour’s Biggest Enemy,” Novara Media, December 10, 2019, novaramedia.com. See also Craig Gent, “‘I’m Not Angry, I’m Disappointed’: What Voters in Reform’s Top Town Really Think,” Novara Media, June 10, 2024. novaramedia.com.
20. Yasmine Ahmed, “We Can’t Ignore the Racism and Islamophobia Fueling Riots in the UK,” Human Rights Watch, August 8, 2024, hrw.org.
21. Ned Rossiter, Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2006).
22. Gent, Cyberboss.