Warehouse workers are treated as expendable surplus bodies to be discarded

Evidence

Late capitalism, in a warehouse, presumes that the worker is completely expendable, a body to use up and burn out as quickly as possible. Those who work in a warehouse are treated as members of a future surplus population, bodies to leave behind once the potential of exploitation has been exhausted. The “lucky” can, if these videos are any indication, escape from the boundaries of the warehouse and enter into a different factory, a different system of production intertwining late capitalism, one that relies on the illusion of luxury for a different kind of exhausting and exploitative labor. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 289

Categorization

• XREF: Links the warehouse infrastructure to Marx’s industrial reserve army concept and to the reader’s four-infrastructure analysis of influencer labor.
• SEED: Could open an essay contrasting the influencer’s ‘illusion of luxury’ labor with the warehouse worker’s expendable-body labor as two poles of late capitalist selfhood.