Fulfillment of the Work Games: Warehouse Workers’ Experiences with Algorithmic Management

The introduction of algorithms into a growing number of industries has restructured the landscape of work and threatens to continue. While a growing body of CSCW research has begun to document these shifts toward the future of work, relatively little is known about workers beyond the platform-mediated gig workers that have received the bulk of attention. In this paper, we turn to a traditional work sector, Amazon fulfillment centers (FC), to deepen the examination of algorithmic management on the experiences of workers. Drawing from two years of ethnographic research, we show how FC workers, when subject to labor-tracking systems and metrics in their physical work environments, react to managers’ interventions, imposed productivity rates, and the company’s treatment of them as numbers. Situating FC workers’ resistance to algorithmic systems and metrics within the current CSCW literature allows us to explicate and link the nuanced practices of FC workers to the larger discourse of algorithmic control mechanisms. In addition, we show how FC workers’ resistance practices are emblematic of ‘work games’—a long-studied means by which workers configure (“trick”) their engagement (and consent) with work systems. We argue that investigating how and to what extent workers’ resistance to algorithmic management can provide us with a more nuanced understanding of workers’ consent in the face of algorithms and expand the economic and political context in which we discuss algorithmic management.