Architecture of Fulfillment
A Night with a Logistic Worker
Presented at the 17th International Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, as part of the installation The Architecture of Fulfillment within the Monditalia exhibition at the Corderie, in 2014. Published in 300 copies by Behemoth Press (Amir Djalali, Hamed Khosravi, Francesco Marullo), with drawings by Eva Le Roi and Lei Mao, and realized with the support of StimuleringFonds Creative Industries.
1
Logistics has a military origin. As it was first systematized by French general Antoine Henri Jomini in his 1893 Precis de L’art de la Guerre, logistics is the management of armies and supplies on a battlefield. Logistics does not only consider composition, the lodging and movements of troops, but also the distribution of provisions in hostile territories, the transportation, storage and delivery of artillery, food, medicines, fuel. Ultimately, logistics deals with the establishment of efficient communication networks, also in terms of the collection and transmission of information.
But the military knowledge of logistics informs the organization of territories and cities also in times of peace. It is not a chance then, that the first Western treatise on architecture, Vitruvius' De Architectura, was written by a soldier and carpenter for Julius Cesar.
The set of principles that Vitruvius defines in the first book have an intrinsic logistic and military nature: the ordinatio, or the ordering of space according to quantity; dispositio, the regular arrangement of parts according to a whole; eurythmia, the proportional relation of the inner parts in a plan; symmetria, the complementary correspondence of the elements within a composition; decor, the proper suitability to customs, rules, traditions and natural conditions; and finally distributione, standing for the Greek oikonomia, which is the appropriate disposal of a site, building procedures and expenses. The logistic nature of architecture becomes even more explicit in the tenth book of the treatise, dealing with mechanical apparatuses, military devices and stratagems to undermine the hostile forces at war.
2
Between the III and II century BC, Romans defeated Gallic populations and colonized the vast areas of forests and marshlands stretching between the Appennines and the river Po. The control of the territory was ensured by a vast bureaucratic program of land reclamation and its following redistribution among families of colonists. The most iconic instrument of this program was the subdivision of land into square plots (centuriatio) following the orientation of the Aemilia road, which is in some cases still visible today. This land subdivision and the diffused property structure characterized the social and productive milieu of the Aemilian territory in the years to come. During the last half of the 19th century, large industries, and thus workers’ struggles primarily concentrated in the triangle between Genoa Turin and Milan. The territory of the Emilia-Romagna, on the contrary, remained largely agricultural. Yet, small and medium producers began to associate in various forms of cooperative enterprises to ensure collective services such as financial support, distribution, stock and consumption facilities. Fascism strongly hit this cooperative productive milieu. This fuelled the opposition and the resistance against the regime, to the point that after the Second World War the territory became one of the main strongholds of the Italian Communist Party. Paradoxically, the “red” administration of the territories of Emilia Romagna was not supported by an industrial working class active on the same territory. Instead, the network of cooperative enterprises plus the political control of the territories made communism—at least in its Aemilian version. (Instead, communism was - at least in its Aemilian version - the network of cooperative enterprises plus the political control of territory).
3
Logistics is the founding principle of today’s economy. In fact, the more production of material and immaterial goods extended its network of exchange across the globe, the more supply-chain management (SCM) eventually turned in the necessary condition for efficient circulation of commodities and information. Hence, whereas Fordism operated through linear assembly-lines and hierarchies of subcontractors, by imposing mass-standardized objects upon massive requests of consumers, contemporary lean-production works instead through a reversed procedure, calculating the manufacturing process upon the consumers’ demands while retroactively processing materials in different places at different times via an extended network of autonomous suppliers and assembling operators. Whereas Fordism was based on production, logistics is meta-production: second-level production, the production of production, the infrastructure that makes any other production possible, following and predicting the ever-changing trends of an unstable economy of desire.
4
The productive ecosystem of the Aemilian territory remained present also after the fall of the Berlin wall: its “actually existing socialism” easily adapted to the neoliberal economy. Whereas other areas of Northern Italy suffered the demise of industrial facilities, the Aemilian economy was already equipped to cope with the shift towards a service-based economy. Moreover, the juridical toolbox of the cooperative system assumed a particular twist under the neoliberal economy: both diffused self-employment and the worker’s association in the company’s shares, from being a tool of autonomy and cooperation became instruments of precarity of employment and economic uncertainty. In this way, the cooperative jurisdiction set up the premises to bypass collective labor contracts and national regulations, attracting the greed for profit of major foreign investors. Logistic corporations, while maintaining their international scope and global traffic, plugged themselves within the Aemilian cooperative ecosystem, ensuring the recruitment of cheap, on-demand, and unregulated labor force. The unsustainable length of the working day, the missed respect of hygienic and safety rules, low wages, moral and physical blackmail are the usual working conditions under which porters are subject in the fulfillment centers. And it is precisely among the workers of the service cooperatives that since 2008 the mobilization started: in Piacenza, the two main struggles took place in TNT (July 2011) and IKEA (November 2012-January 2013).
5
Traditional unionism was unable and unwilling to take part and organize the struggles. Instead, an independent syndicalist group, SI Cobas, gained the respect of the most foreign workers as an organization capable to materially support their struggle. Instead of the representative “legal” rituals of programmed strike hours, bargaining procedures and planned street demonstrations proposed by the unions, SI Cobas supported the worker’s strategical preference for a wildcat blockage the flow of commodities in and out the fulfillment centres. In this way, the workers were able to directly attack the shipping companies at the core of their operations and systematically damaging their profits. The solidarity among workers of different nationalities and from different companies (also from other cities) made possible to overcome the arrests and the violence of the police, as well as the blackmailing opposition of the employers against the most politically active workers. Among the logistic corporations in the territory of Piacenza, Amazon stands as a unique example. Instead of relying upon the system of cooperatives for the discipline and control of labor force, Amazon makes use of an internal system based on the construction of a strong corporate ideology. The renewal of contracts and the hope for undetermined employment are always subordinated to a series of moral threats: constantly increasing demands in terms of performance, the encouragement of “feedbacks” upon the behaviour and performance of fellow workers, the forced participation to corporate leisure activities are only a few of the techniques used by the warehouse managers to divide and control a young and disillusioned workforce with few other jobs alternatives. This strategy, combined with a pervasive military control and surveillance inside and at the gates of the fulfillment centre has been so far successful in keeping away the possibility of organization and syndicalist penetration among the workers.
6
Logistics is an information system able to translate any type of obscure desires and capacities into abstract and calculable determinations: through logistics, life is rendered through standard quantities and operations to be performed. The history of its architecture is a history of a progressive homogenization and standardization of its components and facilities. The space of logistics is based on fixed volumetric units, of which the container, the TEU (Twenty-Foot Equivalent) is the most representative. The history of the container was not a peaceful one. Rather, it was written in letters of blood and fire, disrupting existing productive and labor structures while subverting the understanding of global trades and geopolitical orders. The architecture of logistics is then a direct modulation of these standardized procedures, making the warehouse a highly generic environment able to cope with instability and change. The architecture of the fulfillment centre is then a crucial example of this tendency. Factories evolved through the maximization of space and the rationalization of the workers’ movements – as docile bodies in mechanical panopticons of compartmentalized sectors. Inheriting all the factory’s disciplinary elements on the bodies of its workers, the fulfillment centre adds a layer of more pervasive control, performed through the use of information technologies and cybernetic algorithms. The trajectories of the workers in the fulfillment centres are not based on a repetition of standard and simplified gestures in a fixed space, but they vary according to the instant needs of production. The workers' movement is then overdetermined by the information system through a barcode reader, which tells what the worker should do and at the same time records his/her performance and speed. The very space of the shelf on which commodities are stored is not organized through a taxonomy or a hierarchical order. On the contrary, “the order of things” in the fulfillment centre is completely rhizomatic and no apparent human-readable logic can be recognized. At the same time, the extreme standardization of procedures is supported by an incredibly large variety of labor and life forms, from truck drivers to IT technicians, from security operators to cleaners, local and migrants workers with precarious or seasonal contracts. Often considered as an ”architecture without humans,” the warehouse is, in fact, the breeding ground for new forms of worker’s resistance and organization, to the point that logistic worker’s struggle imposes us to update the categories through which we read politics and the city.
7
In his Teoria general de la urbanizaciòn Ildefonso Cerdà was the first to point out the necessity to go beyond the traditional Western conception of the city as a political body constituted by its citizens. Cerdà sought to overcome the city and the irrationality of its politics with the invention of a new science which he called urbanization. Against the city’s emphasis on borders, separation and enclosures, urbanization is based on the removal of all the obstacles to the free flow of people and commodities: as in his project for the expansion of Barcelona, circulation becomes the main element to be solved, to which all the other problems are to be subordinated. Recent commentators saw the birth of urbanization as the beginning of a tendency of depoliticization of collective life. No longer a contested ground, collective life is left to be regulated by the alleged neutrality and necessity of economic laws, which can be described through scientific means. For this reason, it has been suggested that the only efficient way to oppose the economy’s rule on our life is to cut circulation, to break the logistic infrastructure that permeates our cities and our life by sabotaging the main arcs and nodes of its well-honed network. In fact, it is precisely through the blockage of circulation (namely, the blockage of the fulfillment centre’s gates) that forms of organization, and new forms of coexistence are starting to emerge, in Piacenza and in other parts of the world. The blockage produces bonds between opposed communities, trust where suspicion ruled, confidence against fear.
8
But logistics is not an over-arching, transcendent power imposed on the planet’s surface and on our lives. On the one hand, logistics originates and learns from our lives, our movements, our desires. In a paranoid fashion, it makes connections, it establishes connections by the aggregation of data. On the other hand, no one is really able to control logistics. Like a scientific experiment ended in the wrong way, it produced a monster beyond the control of its creators. If workers will probably be never in control of the abstract operational mechanisms of logistics, it is also true that logistics exceeds the control of capitalists themselves. For these reasons, logistics calls for a surrealist paranoid-critical heuristics, leading its connectivity and its capacity for organization down unusual paths.
9
Logistics remains today the art of war. But whereas in the past it dealt with external enemies, today its battlefield has been internalized. The borders that once were external, have been introjected within the extended space of the metropolis as thresholds of intensities, checkpoints of measurement and control, amplifiers of value. The movements of troops has been substituted by the transnational migration of labor force. Military camps are transformed in centres of detention and expulsion for migrants. Logistics is today’s art of class war.
The Story of M.
[03.30 PM] M. wakes up. Eyes open looking at the ceiling. Blank idleness. She’s tired and stressed: she doesn’t want to get up. Waking up in the middle of the afternoon is always difficult: the sun is already high and the shadows run long over the walls. Outside noises: the city slowly moves over the lunch break. M. mentally repeats in her mind what to do: picking up the kid at school, buy stuff for dinner, visit her sister in Piacenza, take the car from garage. [03.40 PM - 04.20 PM] Shower, dressing up, preparing the working equipment, turning on the laundry, washing few cups and plates in the kitchen, make her bed, cleaning around. Shoulders and feet still hurting for the last night. A hell of a walk last night. She smokes in silence. Boredom pervades the empty kitchen. [04.30 PM] M. steps outside. She walks towards the primary school. It’s very close: normally it takes 15 minutes. Everything is close in Codogno, a village of 15.000 souls, 20 km from Piacenza and 30km from the Castel San Giovanni Logistic Park. She moved here 10 years ago. [04.45 - 04.50 PM] Right on time. M. is always careful to not arrive late at the parish gate, otherwise the kid gets scared and begins to cry all the afternoon. Few words with the other women and relatives waiting for the bell. Idle talk, forced niceness: how’s going? how’s work? still at Atacama hum?promotions? exhausting.. Leaving the kid at the church is a somehow forced choice. Municipality stopped providing the afternoon program last year. Life in Codogno is slow and quiet: the ideal setting for a suburban horror B-movie. [05.00 PM] Kids run out from the parish shouting and running. They hug each other. M. asks him about the day and the math class while walking home. It’s a sunny day. [05.20 PM] They are back home. The kid jumps in, throwing the schoolbag on the ground. Merenda. Some jokes. They laugh. She looks at the kid eating chocolate remembering the years gone. We go to the aunt, get ready! take your toothbrush! [05.40 PM] Car is broken: they need to get the bus to Piacenza. From Codogno to Piacenza is not a long ride on the SS9. Interior of the bus. Traits of Pianura’s urban sprawl. The agricultural village melts into fields, factories, boxes, billboards. The historical town is only visible from far away. They cross the river Po and the island marking the border between Lombardia and Emilia Romagna. [06.15 PM] Supermarket. Today meat is on special offer. Salad, tomatoes, carrots, fruits, tampons, biscuits, rigatoni, a bottle of wine, pasta. She forgot the “fìdaty” card: fuck. Her sister house is close-by. They opened a playground. The kid runs. She looks at him smiling. Sunset. [07.00 PM] They end up in a residential flat. Bags with shopping are heavy. Doorbell. 3rd floor. Interior of her sister’s apartment: they hug each other. Her sister is older. I need the car again, mine is broke. They talk for a while in the kitchen. Details, gossips. They begin preparing. [07.30 - 08.15 PM] Setting up the table, cooking. Dinner. Meat was good. [08.30 PM] M. starts preparing her bag. She helps her sister to wash dishes and to clean. She hugs the kid, takes the keys and leaves. [08.35 PM] Alone, in the car, the night outside. Lights on, 90 km/h, traffic is smooth. The city is going back home while she’s driving to work, along the SP 10 to Castel San Giovanni. Road signs, lights: it seems she never abandoned that place. [09.00 PM] M. gets to the Logistic Area. At the gate, under the lights of the fence, there is a crowd of people with boards and flags, stopping every car moving in. They are distributing fliers. At her turn they ask to open the window. Nucleo Antagonista Piacentino. A redskin-type dude with glasses leaves her a flyer. Do not get tired too much... You will be fired anyway [09.05 PM] M. goes through the gate showing the badge to the security guy. She is allowed to get in. Maximum speed in the parking lot is 15 km/h. Slowly she finds a spot to park, ensuring to use the back gear as written in the regulations. Done. She gets out and takes her bag, steps out from the car. Queue at the entrance. [09.10 PM] At the door, first security check, turnstile. Again the badge. M. passes through the cabin along with other women into a long corridor leading to the changing rooms. She arrives to the locker, opens it with a code. She puts on t-shirt, sport sweatshirt, fluorescent yellow jacket, the green badge with name, surname, identity barcode, photograph, position. Who has a temporary contract is blue, for the indeterminate contract is green. Running shoes. She empties her pockets in a metal box: mobile, coins, clock, necklace, a ring into a box, like in an airport. M. cannot communicate with anybody inside - not even with her kid. Phone calls are admitted only during coffe-breaks. She has few words with a moroccan women. [09.25 PM] Narrow corridor. Second security check. Screening. Controls are executed by an external security agency, carefully recruited among specific political groups. Always the same story. A long line of people with yellow jackets awaiting at the metal detector. They talk. She waits her turn. Everything is fine. She is in. Change of space and lights: from the compression to the extended floor of the distribution center. [09.30 PM] A siren announces the beginning of the shift turn. 10 minutes briefing. Hundreds of people gathered in a large circle in the central open space. The team of managers in the middle. Behind them, rows of table with monitors and computers. Far away long series of shelves. One of the managers with a microphone talks setting the goals to be hit during the night. Everyday the same story, like a mantra, the same slogans. The most common word is “we”, “team”, a soccer match in which everybody is involved, everybody has to work harder to score goals. They call it “success story”. Leadership. Discipline. Organisation. blablabla [09.40 PM] M. is a picker, meaning one of those going up and down across the distribution center picking up objects. After the speech there is a rapid dispersion. Everybody goes to his/her position: the eachers run towards the gates to break their backs unloading and loading packages; stowers at the forklifts and racks assigning barcodes to each items; pickers to the scanner boxes; packers to the desk next to long expedition snakes crossing the whole warehouse. [09.45 PM] Tonight they announced a new production record. The winner is this blond guy, very shy. Once she saw him buying groceries at the market and they exchanged few words. Before it was a carpenter. Yeah Yeah: congratulations to this new hero! Shit. Humiliating. [09.50 PM] Queue in front of the scanner shelves. Beside the scanners, boxes of rechargeable batteries. After the scanner a picker needs to pick up a bin and a tote. M. awaits for her turns. She takes a tote parked in the are and activates it passing the scanner on the barcode. Then she plugs in the bin and starts moving. Immediately after that, the scanner lights up with a message: it is the first task. The game begins. [10.00 PM] ZONE F, ROW 124, HEIGTH B, POSITION 322. 15 seconds to pick it up. It’s a book. Title: L’Armata dei Sonnambuli Author: WuMing Year: 2014. It’s close. M. does not have so much time for thinking. A picker needs only to execute. Usually you have just a bunch of minutes to execute the tasks, even seconds . ASIN - Amazon Standard Identification Number. bip! [10.10 PM - 11.30 PM] Orders arrive faster and faster. Scanner is constantly monitoring your movements: it does not only assign orders, but it also provide the position of each worker, the rhythm of his/her performance, the rate of productivity directly to managers, real-time. During the first months, when she just began, she often stopped to breath, between one task and the other, getting immediately rebuked. She had negative feedbacks. [11.35 PM] Sometimes M. believes they are all zombies. As if they had been hypnotized to mathematically execute. There’s no time to think: you have just to move, chasing packages here and there. Legs hurt, arms shaking but after a while you don’t feel them any longer. There are people feeling bad and even fainting, suddenly falling down fainting. Yet nobody protest. At the briefing time, sometimes she turns around to see if everybody has the eyes open and make sure they are not sleeping. Atacama is you. [11. 52 PM] ZONE C, ROW 34, HEIGHT A, POSITION 47 Slint. Spiderland. 47 sec. Great album. She was used to listen with G. when they were still at high school. Before everything got serious. Before everything got boring. She smiled looking at the thousand of sprinklers on the ceiling, hoping for a deluge to come down. One day is gone. [01.20 AM] The floor of the distribution center is like an airport: a complex plateau of signs and information to have smooth circulation and avoid accidents. Despite the heavy traffic, 4000 people almost, there is absolute silence all around. Only the bips of the scanners and the voices of the stowers at the racks resonate in the gigantic hangar. [01.40 AM] ZONE B, ROW 12, HEIGHT A, POSITION 38 Biscuits; ZONE B, ROW 89, HEIGHT B, POSITION 76 Japanese Condoms, 39 sec.; ZONE B, ROW 43, HEIGHT C, POSITION 29 Call of Duty Advanced Warfare. 12 sec. M. keeps on running. She often thought to be within a videogame. The scanner gives her just a bunch of seconds to pass from an order to the other: the faster you perform the higher the score. It is a continuous struggle between stamina and production, orders and speed. She hated that. One of the first days at Atacama she stopped to drink water looking at the colleagues running around. There was no communication, no exchange, no smiles nor voices. They were completely alone and isolated as videogamers. If the factory was terrible, at least you could have shouted or laugh along the assembly line: here your position is totally anonymous and you look at the shelves as a screensaver. Atacama loves you. [02.05 AM] Tote full. Going back to base to check out items for packers. Tonight M. is very slow. She’s losing the game. only 65 items per hour... usually she’s around 90-95 even 100 per hour. Of course not like the hero of the week.. 120 per hour. [02.10 AM] Sometimes M. works 42 hours a week, six times a week, 20 km per day. Videogame. They do not ask for a medical certificate nor there is a medical point in the center. Once a guy cut his hand at the packages and they had to bring him to the hospital in Piacenza. [02.34 AM] ZONE E, ROW 94, HEIGHT C, POSITION 40, Hello Kitty pregnancy test. 72 sec.; M. crosses a guy she met at her recruitment course. 28 years old like her, blond, nice face, French. They did the preliminary training together. Once he told her he used to be a journalist. M. was embarrassed: there was even a moment of contact among the two, for just few seconds, bringing back the items to the tote. [03.00 AM] Siren. Second break. M. leaves her tote parked along the row, quickly running towards the coffee-room. She pass the security. They have 2 twenty minutes breaks along the night shift. 5 have already gone to reach the room. The break is necessary to have sugar. With such efforts, constant attention and walked distances you need to feed yourself properly. This should not only happen during the night shift but actually before. M. had to force eating at very strange hours of the day, to ensure sufficient energies for her night performance. The distribution center is all over her life. It goes quite beyond S. Giovanni, shaping her daily-routine both before and after. People got depressed. They go out when others are waking up. They sleep when everything around is running. Zombie. Atacama is all around you. Siren again. [03.07 AM] Only few people manage to talk. The others just stare at the coffee-cup or at the wall. On the table, those shitty jokes provided by Atacama. [03.20 AM] ZONE B, ROW 89, HEIGHT A, POSITION 68 Do-it-yourself-fishing-kit, 50 sec.; ZONE C, ROW 47, HEIGHT B, POSITION 72, Nineteenth-century replica theatre binoculars, 15 sec. A warning message on her scanner: you are going slower than your average rhythm. Soon M. will be contacted by a manager on the floor. The rule of the Atacama videogame, in fact, is to constantly improve your productivity, the relation between accomplished tasks and speed. it is even among the internal regulations: if you do not have any improvement you will be first formally rebuked, and later you will receive an official warning letter. Atacama is a constant evaluating machine: it works through information and modulation. [03.30 AM] There are no workers’ association within Atacama so far. Despite the company had many problems in other countries, in Piacenza there is not enough anger. Last month those migrants in IKEA got something really big. Here we’ve got only fucking hipsters. Only the French dude seemed to have something in mind. . [03.42 AM] ZONE B, ROW 71, HEIGHT B, POSITION 48 Horse-riding socks. 40 sec. Lovely. M. is tired. Madam, what’s up? Everything is fine? Tonight I could see that your ‘prod value’ are low. [04.50 AM] The siren calls the day: it is the end of the night shift. Slowly, a large crowd of people orderly moves towards the exit points, following the yellow and blue signs on the ground. M. parks the tote and walks all the way through the deposit. [05.00 AM] The long queue at the metal detector and security gate. She waits more than 10 minutes before being checked. [05.10 AM] Locker-rooms full of people, unable to talks. M. undresses and leaves shoes and yellow-jacket in the locker. She prepares her bag to leave. [05.15 AM] Outside the night is almost over. In the sky the first signs of the morning. Fog. A yellow note on her car. Let’s talk soon. Call me. 329 12345678 J-B. M. turns on the car as all the others. Queue at the gate to get out from the parking lot. She waves at her friend saying goodbye. [05.20 AM - 06.00 AM] M. runs back to Piacenza, back to her sister’s house. Her eyes are almost closing. She feels strange, as if she ate wooden toy cubes [06.00 AM] Back at her sister place. She parks the car and goes in. [06.10 AM - 06.30 AM] She undresses, then shower and dries her hair. [06.40 AM] She goes in the kitchen, her sister is up. She takes the espresso-machine and lights the fire to prepare coffee They sit at the table in front of the window and talk, waiting.[06.45 AM] Coffee is ready. They drink and eat biscuits. Outside the window: the sunrise behind cityscape. [07.00 AM] Her sister leaves and say goodbye. She stays at the table,in the empty kitchen looking at the ceiling. She’s almost falling asleep. [07.10 AM] She goes in the son’s room and wakes him up softly, kissing his head and caressing him. The kid wakes up and they hug each other. Slowly the kid get’s prepared to go to school. [08.00 AM] They take the bus back to Codogno. The sun is up. [8.30 AM] In front of the school, kisses. The kid runs in. She smiles. [8.45 AM] M. slowly walks home. Leaves the keys on the table. Lights up the room and undresses before falling in bed. Exhausted, she closes her eyes and sleeps.
