Technology and the Labour Process: Insights from Indian E-Commerce Warehouses

In the context of innovation in and the application of information and communication technology (ICT), this article seeks to understand how ICT-enabled tools, including algorithmic processing interfaces, cloud computing software, QR codes and barcodes, have become a new managerial equipment for organising, controlling, and disciplining the labour force in the warehouses of e-commerce enterprises in India. This article engages with labour process theory which accords analytical importance to technology in organising work, for managerial control and disciplinary regimes in furtherance of capital accumulation. The evidence here derives from four month’s field work in 2022–23 from Bangalore in south India. Data were generated from 74 semi-structured interviews with employees of, principally, Amazon and Flipkart. The major findings are that an integrated, digitised control system operating in tandem with direct human supervision, ensures the simultaneous processing of products orders and the monitoring of workers’ performance. Further, it investigates how they contribute to work intensification and exacerbated job-related insecurities and vulnerabilities. The outcome is extreme work intensity and the creation of new forms of worker insecurity and vulnerability.