Reproducing disposability: Unsettled labor strategies in the construction of e-commerce markets
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Once the logistics revolution’s paradigmatic retail model, big box retail’s declining growth over the last 15 years has left retailers searching for new outlets of expansion. One solution to this problem has been to construct e-commerce markets in order sell delivery as much as the goods delivered. Similar to Walmart’s ascendance, warehousing is again at the vanguard of these new retail models. Significantly, e-commerce’s demands on warehousing dramatically increase the amount of labor warehouses employ and the quality requirements of warehouse work. This article investigates how warehouse labor is being reproduced and restructured in order to construct e-commerce markets. My research indicates an emerging management strategy to meet these demands by scaling back their reliance on labor market intermediaries. I demonstrate this trend through the examples of two different warehouses where management stopped using temp agencies in one case and reduced their reliance on agencies and third parties in a second case. While these changes moved workers closer to “standard” forms of employment, their disposability was reproduced through discourses of “unskilled” labor and logistical practices of retention. These insights develop our understanding of flexible labor’s production in logistics and challenge broader understandings of labor market intermediaries’ significance.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it