MIT Press would like to thank the anonymous reviewers who provided comments on drafts of this book. I will donate all proceeds from this book to people and organizations fighting for a better future.
Introduction
For personal stories and context, I interviewed fast fashion retail workers, retail labor organizers, and activists. This book presents one of the first ethnographies of the fast fashion retail industry, but perhaps more than that, this book is a first-hand account of work and life in the digital age.
Outline
The 'future of work' is not somewhere in the distant future; it unfolds in the present moment. In the conclusion, I summarize how digital tools play a central role in disciplining fast-fashion labor, reinforcing economic insecurity among marginalized populations, and intertwining with more overt forms of state surveillance and violence.
How Fashion Became Fast
As the march dissipated, I was overcome with curiosity about the new fast fashion goliath. At the time of my studies, fast fashion was an increasingly important player in the global market.
Fast Fashion and the Global Garment Industry
Instead, fast fashion retailers and other just-in-time retailers participate in an attractive production model in which data—such as that shared by retailers. So far, I've described how fast fashion is using digital tools to speed up production, which has negative consequences for garment workers and the environment.
A Very Brief History of Retail Labor
A 2014 survey found that 62 percent of retail employees are women and 21 percent are black.45 At Walmart, for example, women make up 55.7 percent and blacks make up 26.4 percent of hourly employees.46 In contrast, the U.S. My educated hunch, based on extensive fieldwork, was that fast fashion retail workers were among the most exploited in the industry and made up a large proportion of society's already marginalized population.
New York: Fast Fashion’s Flagship City
And the more I looked out for it, the more I saw fast fashion around town. There are no Walmarts in New York City—although its e-commerce site, Jet, leased a warehouse in the Bronx in 201858—while fast-fashion retailers are scattered across major urban centers.
Algorithmic Scheduling, Unstable Lives
They created a text loop where one person would take a picture of the schedule and share it with everyone else in the group. I have one more week to live.” He said that if he had been better at saving, he would have been able to live more easily with what he received.
Tools of the Trade
Overall, Derek's story helps highlight one of the central conflicts in fast-fashion retail: advanced technologies help fast-fashion companies rake in huge profits, but it's clear that these tools are almost always in the interest of employers are used. Flexible scheduling has profound negative consequences for low-hourly workers, who must shoulder the risks and instability of the marketplace.
Automated Schedules, Unstable Lives
My manager, Dante, joked, “I hate you!” and hung up the phone before I could respond; he also approached me while I was at work and asked if I wanted to stay late. Despite what appeared to be open communication and reasonable expectations, Kronos or a similar program may have flagged Rachel's absence as "non-compliance" and she was fired.
Total Flexibility
Although Rachel described feeling like “just a body,” it also felt like she was just a data point. Perhaps that's what Esther Kaplan meant when she titled her essay on data-driven management "The Spy Who Fired Me."
McFashion
I took the opportunity to leave the shop and grab a coffee, letting the sugar coat my sore throat as I pondered the irony of the situation. I wondered if such leniency would be applied to employees who are late for a train.
Style Queen
We were led to the conference room, where four different Style Queen employees asked us questions. At the same time, we had to build towers on our individual chairs with the toy blocks.
Workers on Demand
I returned to the store entrance and ran into Ariana, a redhead who was being interviewed at the same time I was. She came out of the back office and spoke to someone who told her to come back at 2:30 p.m.
The Automated Heart: Digitization of Service Work
As a teenager in the 1990s, when my friends and I would go to the mall, we would sometimes play The Buckle Challenge. Buckle is a clothing store tailored for teenagers and young adults. However, once the clothes are poured onto the sales floor, the work of "maintaining" the store and the items within it remains a top priority - against the usual concepts of service work.
The Heart of Our Store”: The Stockroom
Did you like doing that work?
Jayla, who worked at Forever 21 in New York City, described how music marked the boundary between the sales floor and the stockroom: "The basement wasn't part of the sales floor at all. In many ways, Lemonade set the mood not only in the warehouse, but in the moment: a feeling of frustration with the status quo and a black feminist desire for new ways of being in the world.
A Flow of Chaos” on the Sales Floor
- Did you ever get reprimanded for that at all?
- When you were a sales associate, did you come up with tricks to get things done efficiently?
- Do you ever see people slacking off while they’re working?
- Can you tell me how people do that? How do they get away with it?
In Sallaz's case of call center workers, permanent pedagogy emerged from the unpredictability of the customer service encounter. I thought again of the interview games at Style Queen, described in the previous chapter.
Garment Caring” in the Fitting Room
A manager walking around the fitting room once muttered, "No clothes care," as she buttoned a blouse. Susanna, a former H&M employee, once rushed to the fitting room to cry after an upsetting encounter with a homophobic customer.
Cash Register Queues
Dressing rooms in the age of the automated heart are not officially carefree. Most of the time there are only two people working the cash register and they are very slow.
Sociological Implications of the Automated Heart
In some ways, with the rise of online review sites, customers have seemingly replaced mystery shoppers, with the power to document every negative interaction for everyone. What matters—and where these bottlenecks in the system reveal potential holes—is when automation overburdens many aspects of the retail process while it expects its human staff to keep up.
How Retailers Use New Technologies to Surveil Workers
Jo alerted us to one employee working in the dressing room who apparently posted a selfie on Instagram with the caption: “Supposed to be working. In the twenty-first century, employers are enlisting the help of digital Pinkertons to keep workers in line.
NRF Protect
I asked one vendor if people in the retail stores agreed to the use of facial recognition. Research shows that facial recognition technology leads to disproportionately higher false positives for darker-skinned people.7 There have been many cases where people of color have been wrongly apprehended because they were improperly identified by facial recognition software.
In Touch and On Time: Biometric Fingerprint Scanners as Time Management
What would you have to do when it didn’t work?
Susanna: I should inform the manager and then I would make time for you.
Did that ever happen to you?
Furthermore, in my observations, employees regularly engaged in small efforts to reclaim time for themselves, for example, as I mentioned in the previous chapter, escaping to the assembly room - one of the few free spaces from the menacing gaze of CCTV. send messages, take selfies or just admire yourself in the mirror. As feminist surveillance studies scholar Shoshana Magnet explains, rudimentary fingerprint scanning technology first appeared in Wall Street investment firms like clockwork.18 These scanners were marketed by the company Identification, which was acquired in the 1990s by Wackenhut, now known as G4S, one of the world's largest private security companies.
Point-of-Sale Surveillance: “You Know We Track That, Right?”
Would you log into the register with your employee card or something?
Elijah: No, you have a PIN and your employee number, so a six or seven digit code, now it can be up to seven.
And why did you do that? Do you know?
Do you know why they had people log in?
I'd type in a code and, you know, it wouldn't give me anything, or I'd search and pick. For example, I'll choose this shirt because it has the same design, you know?
Analog Threads
Can you tell me, when you come to work, how do you clock in and track your time and stuff like that?
What do you mean?
They pat down your body?
How Data Fashions Precarity
More important than knowing the product was providing a positive and formal interaction with customers.28 As I discussed in the previous chapter, sociologist Arlie Hochschild coined the term "emotional labor" in this era to capture how companies make money to control human feelings. . Mystery shoppers would probably benefit their business, but at the same time I almost feel like this store is such a vehicle for money that they almost don't care.” As customer service takes a back seat to maintaining a non-stop flow of goods, the need for 'affective pinkertons' in the form of mystery shoppers is diminishing.
Retail Disruptions: Confronting Digital Surveillance
The digital connections between retail work and anti-police organizing emerge from their entanglement with what a group of scientists at the University of Michigan's Precarity Lab call technoprecarity, it shows. For BLM, I focus on the 2014 and 2015 protests at the Mall of America in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which represented some of the most dramatic attacks on the nexus of consumer capitalism, digital surveillance, and policing.
The Retail Action Project
The Retail Action Project differs from other labor centers in that it was created out of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. I think RAP had a handle on the retail business when it was smaller in town.
Snapshot: RAP at NRF’s Big Show
RAP will seek to confront some of these issues at the annual meeting of the National Retail Federation. Outside, we joined a few others in the group, holding large cut-out letters that read "WE HAVE A DREAM." game.
Critical Data Praxis in the Labor Movement
Recognizing that technology is never neutral, but rather an instrument of power, Rachel also praised New York City's 2017 ban—which RAP and RWDSU lobbied heavily in favor of—against shift scheduling as a method to combat this “temporal inequality”18 and to shift the weight in favor of workers' interests. In the years since I conducted this research, RWDSU has been active in organizing Whole Foods and Amazon workers, where technology is an even more obvious threat to workers' health and well-being.19.
Disrupting Business as Usual: Black Lives Matter in Retail Space
And third, this mall actually started out as one of the first malls in the city that catered primarily to a white clientele. Arguably one of the most dramatic politicizations of retail occurred at the Mall of America.
BlackChristmas: BLM at MOA
Can you say a little more about that and what that felt like? Or why that reference?
Similarly, Joey, a friend of mine, told me: "The disruption was not only caused by the space-time of the shops, but also by people's subjective dispositions as consumers – both by the protest and through the circulation of images of the protest – for example, the dystopian character from 1984 of the giant TV screen telling people to leave." Gabe noted that he heard through one of the common chants that day - "Who do you protect. Who do you serve?" – it became clear that the police functioned as an apparatus not only for the state, but also for capital and its many manifestations.
Toward a Critical Data Praxis
The protests fundamentally challenged this idea, showing how these profits – in their various forms – are built on exploitation, violence and dispossession. These ideas helped me think about how what connects RAP and BLM isn't just geography—in that they both protest in and around retail spaces—or demographics—in that they both organize insecure people. of communities of color—but their visions of a better society: they are both building toward a critical data practice.
Conclusion: Refashioning the Future of Work
And these aren't related to the company's bottom line, but real quality-of-life issues or questions that needed to be addressed. This lunch, however, would be unfortunate as the company was trying to be cost conscious, he explained with a smile and a wink.
Afterword
We walked to the busy Target parking lot, which was seemingly devoid of law enforcement. Earlier in the pandemic, sometime during the summer of 2020, I went to the Mall of America, mostly out of curiosity.
Appendix: Researching Retail
With this second position I hoped to get a job in the hosiery department, which would allow me to better understand the different components of the labor process. I know that if this book ends up in the wrong hands, it could be used to inform the continued evolution of store workforce management and supervision technologies.
Notes
Nicola Davis, “Fast Fashion Speeding Toward Environmental Disaster, Report Warns,” The Guardian, April 7, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2020/apr/07/fast-fashion- speeding-toward- environmental -disaster-report-warn. Julie Beck, “The Concept Creep of “Emotional Labor,” The Atlantic, Nov. 26, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/11/arlie-hochschild-housework-isnt-emotional-labor/ 576637.
Conclusion
Vivian Wang, “Worker Deaths Scrutinize Big Tech in China,” New York Times, 1 Feb. 2021, https://www.nytimes.com business/china-technology-worker-deaths.html. Sebastian Herrera, “Amazon Faces Growing Worker Pressure in Shadow of Alabama Union Vote,” Wall Street Journal, March 24, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-faces-growing-worker- pressure-in-shadow-of-alabama-union-vote.
Appendix
Katitza Rodriguez og Svea Windwehr, "Workplace Surveillance in Times of Corona," Electronic Frontier Foundation, 10. september 2020, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/09/workplace-surveillance-times-corona. Asad Haider og Salar Mohandesi, "Workers' Inquiry: A Genealogy," Viewpoint Magazine, 27. september 2013, https://www.viewpointmag.com workers-inquiry-a-genealogy;.
Index
See also Clothing Industry's Dressing Room; Sales of the floor covering industry; The clothing industry's warehouse. See also Cash register of the clothing industry; Sales of the floor covering industry; The clothing industry's warehouse.