Influencer-hopeful warehouse vlogs document grueling labor performed mainly by nonwhite workers

Evidence

In these videos, we hear influencer hopefuls tell us about warehouse work and the promise of relatively decent wages—pay that, for a little while, legitimizes constant, mindless repetition, resulting in long-term bodily injury. Most of those who appear in these videos are nonwhite, in stark opposition to the homogeneous class and racial makeup of the most popular YouTubers, a detail that betrays the white supremacy inherent within the platform, social media, America, and the world writ large. We hear of relentless surveillance, of long hours that absorb all leisure time, of infantilizing and unserious “incentives” to maintain morale, like pizza parties and cupcakes, of punitive punishments and rules designed to isolate workers from family members and from each other, of burnout and exhaustion. We hear how the pay, which may be enough to excuse this terrible work for a month or two, conceals the sheer damage warehouse work inflicts on one’s entire existence. One creator of this kind of video, Anthony Bender, who posts on YouTube as Ayebender, tells us, “When I started, I was like, ‘Oh, man, I’m getting bank, I’m making money, you know?’” After several months, Bender began to realize just how repetitive and dull the work was, how he was forced to constantly work long hours. He thought he couldn’t quit, though, because he was making more money in his warehouse job than he had in any job previously. “It would kill me every day to go in there, like I would dread waking up… . It’s taxing on your body, it’s taxing on your mental health. You’re just a robot to them.” There are videos that provide tips for how to survive and thrive in a warehouse job, delivered by people who have managed to leave the warehouse life behind. There are videos that aspire to tell us the positives and negatives of working at Amazon, delivered by someone who has been on the job for a few months. There are videos that surreptitiously document a day in the life of someone who packs Amazon boxes for shipping, visualizing the interior of an Amazon warehouse even when the phones and cameras of workers are generally banned. We can watch videos telling us of constant, excessive hours worked, of a lack of overtime, of how warehouse work breaks down the body physically and mentally, how it consumes all of one’s time, how it obliterates one’s will to live—to such an extent that, in one video, warehouse work is repeatedly described as “Hell on Earth” and compared to slavery. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 288

Categorization

• SHARE: A friend following creator-economy labor would care that ex-warehouse workers become influencer hopefuls whose content monetizes their former poverty.