Distribution center of a German retail group at the time of hiring, outskirts of Frankfurt am Main.
Distribution center of a German retail group at the time of hiring, outskirts of Frankfurt am Main.
Research

The Social and Material Worlds of Logistics Blue Collars

Visual Ethnography in France and Germany

Logistics hide behind every shelf of the supermarket, it is involved with each click of the mouse validating the cart of an online shopping site, it materializes in the millions of packages delivered every day at the doors of companies. If we can hardly imagine the world unfolding behind the scenes of our daily life, it is partly because of the promoters of this activity, who used the image of "just-in-time flows" and the promises of its digitalisation to present it as a continuous, self-regulated flow of goods.

Distribution center of a German retail group at the time of hiring, outskirts of Frankfurt am Main.

In today’s France and Germany, packages are still raised by the force of the arms, by so called order pickers. Their activity takes place in warehouses located near major highways. All of these jobs account for 13% of the blue collar jobs in France, 17% in Germany, i.e. 700.000 and 1.7 million people respectively. The Worklog project intends to represent these places, common and yet invisible, and the point of views of the people who work there every day, according to an approach combining sociology and photography.

Project homepage: worklog.hypotheses.org

 

Researcher: Cécile Cuny