There is currently much debate on the labour market effects of the ‘digitalization’ of the economy, primarily about the extent and pace of job destruction through the substitution of routine tasks by machines (Frey and Osborne, 2013; Gregory, Salomons and Zierahn, 2019). Yet some of the available statistics do not show a sizeable decline over the past decade, even in jobs assumed to be most susceptible to computerization, such as occupations in transportation and logistics. In the European Union (EU 28), the number of jobs in the transportation and storage sector strongly re-increased after 2012 and in 2018 exceeded levels predating the financial crisis of 2007-2008, even in occupations strongly affected by technological change, such as plant and machine operators.[1] It may be argued that the full extent of computerization (i.e., the ‘displacement’ scenario) is still to come, the delay resulting from “persisting inhibiting engineering bottlenecks to computerisation” (Frey and Osborne, 2013: 39) or from a lack of profitability (Arntz, Gregory and Zierahn, 2016). Nonetheless, a new perspective of analysis is warranted by the obviously slow displacement in some industries and the possibility that the predicted changes may stretch over quite a long period or never come true to their full extent (for either economic or technological reasons). Rather than focusing only on the number of jobs (and the ‘displacement’ scenario), more attention needs to be paid to changes to their nature, in particular their content and the working and employment conditions attached to them, as many jobs may be transformed rather than simply destroyed (Arntz et al., 2016).

In this regard, different scenarios are conceivable at the occupational level. If digitalization is “routine-replacing technological change” (Gregory et al., 2019), ‘job upgrading’—in particular, in terms of task enrichment and higher skills—is another potential scenario (for the jobs not displaced). But recent research on changes to low-skilled jobs has shifted attention to a third, less optimistic, scenario pointing in the opposite direction: the emergence of “a socially and occupationally undesirable new ‘digital Taylorism’, in which digital technologies permit a level of optimisation of Taylor’s principle of simplification and control of the work process that had hitherto been unattainable” (Hirsch-Kreinsen, 2016: 12). We assume that the emergence of a given scenario and the way it translates into changes to the nature of jobs are not deterministically driven by technological changes. Our aim is to assess in particular the capacity of workers to counter or at least mitigate the “digital Taylorism” scenario, in connection with both economic and institutional contexts.

To this end, we will study low-skilled occupations in the logistics sector, since the technologies framed in the current debate as ‘digitalization’ were first adopted in that sector more than 15 years ago (ten Hompel and Schmidt, 2007) and seem to have fostered forms of neo-Taylorism. To open the black box of workplace transformations, we will adopt a qualitative approach based on expert interviews and company case studies. Our empirical evidence comes from two non-liberal market economies, namely France and Germany. This choice helps to fill an empirical gap, since to date research on warehouse work has focused strongly on liberal market economies, such as Australia, the U.S., and the U.K. (e.g., Newsome, 2010; Wright and Lund, 2006; Jaffee and Bensman, 2016; Sowers, Chiccantell and Smith, 2018). By studying two non-liberal market economies with their more extensive rights for worker representatives, we can better assess how and to what extent workplace transformations induced by digitalization may be influenced by national institutional contexts.

In the following section, we will briefly review recent and earlier debates on revitalization of Taylorist principles in order to identify key features and driving forces of the ‘neo-Taylorism’ scenario as discussed in the literature. The next section will present our analytical framework and identify our core research questions, based on a review of available empirical evidence on the retail logistics sector. It will be followed by a presentation and discussion of our empirical findings.

The persistence of Taylorist principles beyond the Fordist era is not a new phenomenon and has been covered by a broad range of authors. Amossé and Coutrot (2011), for instance, in their survey-based cluster analysis of changes to “socio-productive models” in French firms between 1992 and 2005, find some empirical evidence of not only persistence but even increase in the relative importance of what they call the “neo-Taylorist model.” This model is characterized by low levels of employee discretion, strict management control, and low employee participation, in contrast to the “Toyotist model.” Similarly, for manufacturing firms in Germany and elsewhere, many authors have claimed that Taylorist features may in fact also be found in allegedly post-Fordist forms of organization (such as the lean production system in particular), which have been enabled not least by information technologies (e.g., Pfeiffer, 2007). Though, perhaps relying more on teamwork, job rotation and formal employee involvement, post-Fordism often combines these features with strict instructions and supervision (see also Crowley et al., 2010).

Recent contributions to the debate on ‘digital Taylorism’ have additionally highlighted the potential of new digital technologies to facilitate the parcelling and automation of work or to tighten performance measurement and control (e.g., Spencer, 2018). This dystopian scenario is frequently spelled out with reference to Amazon’s or Walmart’s fulfilment centres, where handhelds and other ‘digital assistant systems’ like ‘pick by voice’ can be used to immediately impose precisely targeted sanctions in case of any detected misbehaviour or low performance (e.g., Head, 2014). However, by focusing too narrowly on the potential of the latest generation of digital tools, we may lose sight of the broader political and economic factors encouraging—or constraining—the expansion and intensification of Taylorist principles. In this regard, a number of studies that draw on labour process theory have convincingly concluded that it is predominantly the dynamics of the economy—such as the restructuring of global value chains or the financialization of the economy—that are channelling the current transformation, in some industries at least, toward a digitally enhanced version of Taylorism (see e.g., the contributions in Briken et al., 2017). The scenario of a digitally enhanced ‘Neo-Taylorism’ or ‘digital Taylorism,’ as developed by these more comprehensive approaches, is thus based on an understanding that a revitalization and intensification of Taylorist principles is facilitated, but not primarily caused, by the spread of new digital technologies. Rather, it results from company strategies to adjust to a changing economic environment.

To sum up, the debate on ‘digital Taylorism’ has redirected our attention to two important dimensions of workplace transformation—job content and performance management—where new digital technologies can in fact produce dystopian outcomes. Yet, just as the increased technological potential to displace low-skilled jobs does not tell us to what extent and why companies will make use of this potential, the increase in technological opportunities to Taylorize low-skilled work does not tell us the extent to which companies might choose this path, why they might do so, and if and how employees are able to resist this trend. These are the core research questions we wish to address in the present analysis.

As discussed above, more comprehensive contributions to the debate on digital Taylorism suggest we should focus on how the dynamics of the economy orchestrate the digital transformation of jobs. In fact, as we will spell out in our analysis, the transformation of the retail supply chain over the past three decades has created strong incentives for French and German logistics firms to intensify Taylorist principles in their warehousing processes. In an attempt to avoid replacing technological with economic determinism, our analysis will be used to elucidate the rationale and contingencies of organizational choices that result in a seeming convergence on digitally enhanced Neo-Taylorism across countries. To this end, we need a multilevel framework for analysis that will connect workplace transformations not only to economic environments but also to technological and institutional ones. We will draw on core insights and conceptual tools from a strand of literature that Doellgast, Lillie and Pulignano (2018) have recently grouped under the heading ‘comparative employment relations.’ In comparison to approaches that aim to identify and explain national models of production or national Varieties of Capitalism (VOC), this strand of research is more concerned with differentiated analysis of firm- and workplace-level developments, by focusing on workers’ strategies and their power to pursue them, in particular through their representatives. This power is derived from different kinds of resources and workers’ capacities to access and mobilize them.

In line with a number of recent studies, we deem it useful to link analysis of workers’ power more closely with the strand of research on how relations between firms in the supply chains shape employment relations at the workplace level (e.g., Newsome et al., 2015, Mendonca and Adsclit ,ei, 2020). Many empirical studies on the logistics sector have particularly highlighted the role of changes to the structural power of workers, i.e., “the power that simply results from the position of the workers within the economic system” (Wright, 2000: 962). The position of their company and/or commercial establishment in the supply chain is a key determinant of such power. It is possible to identify three trends that have profoundly transformed the retail supply chain over the past three decades. While digitalization has not induced these trends, it has certainly facilitated some of them. The first one is the shift from a supply-driven to a demand-driven supply chain. It started in the mid-1980s, when retailers took control of logistics services by channelling an increasing proportion of their supplies through their own ‘distribution centres’ (DCs), instead of relying on direct deliveries from manufacturers to retail stores (Fernie and Sparks, 2014). This transformation brought about the business entities that are the focus of this article: national and regional DCs. The goal of the transformation was to reduce inventory costs and ‘time-compress’ logistical processes. This shift was further reinforced by the adoption of ‘lean logistics’ principles (Jones, Hines and Rich, 1997) from the late 1990s onwards (see also Wright and Lund, 2006). The second shift has been a broader one toward vertical disintegration through privatization of non-core activities, thus increasing the market shares of independent ‘third party logistics’ (3PL) providers. Digitalization has played a facilitating role here through software-based integration of the supply chain, which has facilitated coordination and information exchange between retailers, suppliers and logistics service providers. The threat of outsourcing has further increased pressure by retailers on in-house DCs. Besides outsourcing, companies have also started to optimize their logistics network by moving warehouses to more ‘geo-optimal’ locations. The third shift, e-commerce, has intensified the quest for ever-shorter delivery times and, thus, further ‘time-compresses’ the logistics processes. Taken together, these trends have exerted significant pressures on warehousing costs and contributed to a structurally asymmetrical relationship between retailers and their logistics service providers (Newsome, 2010; Weil, 2014).

The implications for workers’ structural power are, however, not clear-cut. On the one hand, the weak position of logistics service providers arguably limits their bargaining power vis-à-vis retailers and, thus, their ability to deflect increasing cost pressures and other unfavourable terms and conditions imposed on warehouses (Newsome, 2010). This implies weaker positional power for both managers and workers at the warehouse level. On the other hand, several authors have emphasized that the increasingly integrated nature of global value chains gives logistics workers a powerful ’brokerage position’ (or structural power), due to their ability to turn warehouses or ports into “choke points” in the global supply chain (Bonacich and Wilson, 2008). Empirical studies, however, document wide variations in how workers can effectively capitalize on this power (see e.g., contributions in Alimahomed-Wilson and Ness, 2018). A number of studies show how the weak position of warehouses in the retail supply chain translates into ever more coercive or even “despotic” versions of Taylorism (Newsome, Thompson and Commander, 2013), which are characterized by panoptic surveillance and control systems, by stronger recourse to disciplinary measures and by a lack of rules and procedures that can displace conflicts from the shop floor to the collective bargaining table.

While most attention has focused on economic pressures from the position in the supply chain, other sources of workers’ power must be taken into account at the warehouse level to understand potential variations across entities in the same segment of the supply chain. Another source of structural power comes from local labour market conditions, i.e., workers have a stronger bargaining position in tight labour markets. Also crucial is workers’ associational power, i.e., the collective organization and capacity of workers to mobilize, which is based on different kinds of resources, such as workers’ solidarity, either internal (notably cohesive collective identity) or external (horizontal and vertical links within and between unions and the community), as well as “narrative resources” (in particular, as a means to aggregate interests and frame agendas) (Lévesque and Murray, 2010). The above-mentioned trend toward vertical disintegration tends to undermine workers’ associational power by further fragmenting the workforce, through the use of long subcontracting chains and through high use of temp-agency work and/or solo-self-employed workers, as evidenced in particular by studies on the American warehousing sector (e.g., Gonos and Martino, 2011; Jaffee and Bensmann, 2016).

Structural and associational power are interconnected. In particular, several studies have highlighted the critical role of associational power as an important lever to activate workers’ structural power and/or to counterbalance its decline. While the outsourcing trend tends to hamper traditional firm-centred strategies of worker mobilization, these studies show how the structural power of logistics workers can be ‘activated’ by innovative strategies that transcend a firm’s organizational boundaries and even stretch across different segments of the supply chain (cf., Benvegnu, Haidinger and Sacchetto, 2018; Reese and Struna, 2018; Mendonca and Adsclit ,ei, 2020).

Another source of power has attracted less attention. Institutional power refers to bargaining power from institutional resources, such as legal labour standards, notably employment protection, collective bargaining rights and welfare state support. While many studies emphasize the importance of novel forms of worker mobilization, i.e., associational power, little has been written so far on the role of institutional resources, in particular, as a lever to ‘activate’ structural power. This is a gap we can address. By focusing on the warehousing sector in Germany and France, our empirical analyses can shed some light on whether the institutional power resources of organized labour in two non-liberal market economies may enable workers to tap more effectively into their ‘latent’ structural power resources than their counterparts in liberal market economies, thereby altering the path toward digital and ‘despotic’ Neo-Taylorism. We will scrutinize this question by focusing on the two dimensions of workplace transformation that are at the core of the ‘Neo-Taylorism’ debate, namely job content and performance management.

The focus of our research is on companies or business entities whose core activity is to operate warehouses for retail companies. Research was carried out in France and Germany in 2016 and 2017.[2] Fieldwork started with an in-depth industry report in each country—based on existing sources (academic literature, administrative and consulting reports, trade journals, databases) and interviews with industry experts (from trade unions, employer organizations, research institutes)—on the evolution of the industry, the spread of digital technologies and the trends in workplace transformations. The industry reports were used to define selection criteria for the company cases and to assess the representativeness, according to these criteria, of the cases we could access. As a result, care was taken to select cases from both the food and non-food segments of the retail industry, with the aim of covering the two distinct types of warehouses that prevail in the industry: semi-automated warehouses, which are more typical in the non-food segment and conventional warehouses, which are still predominant in the food retail segment. Fully automated warehouses are still rare because of technological barriers and economic considerations (need for large-scale investment). Hence, different factors are slowing down the displacement of jobs echoing the “persisting inhibiting […] bottlenecks to computerisation” mentioned by Frey and Osborne (2013). In ‘semi-automated’ warehouses, only parts of the various processes are automated, with a significant proportion being still performed manually. In conventional warehouses, tasks are mostly performed manually, with the support of forklifts and other electric vehicles, as well as a range of picking technologies.

The selected business entities comprise several distribution centres (DCs), each of which employs approximately one hundred to more than 2000 workers (see Table 1). The large size mirrors the trend toward strong market concentration in the retail sector in both countries. Moreover, all of these business entities are owned by retailers; thus, they are in-house or ‘quasi in-house’ entities (legally independent subsidiaries). Finally, the selected entities belong to retailers that have a long company history and are headquartered in Germany or France; thus, they are not subsidiaries of new players that have entered the market with the surge of e-commerce. As a consequence of all three factors (large size, vertical integration, company age), these companies are covered by a full array of country-specific institutions governing the employment relationship—most importantly, collective agreements and company-level bodies of worker representation; in particular, works councils in Germany and union delegates, and health and safety committees in France.

The selected companies can be regarded as typical only for a specific, albeit important, segment of the retail logistics market (large, quasi-in-house entities providing services to large traditional retailing companies). These limitations will nonetheless enable us to study precisely what happens in an environment that provides relatively favourable conditions for the employees’ ability to mitigate the trend toward Neo-Taylorism. There are two reasons. First, vertical integration of warehouses can be assumed to enhance the structural power of workers, as compared to warehouses operated by 3PL-providers. In the first case, retailers are presumably less willing to ‘exit’ the longstanding contracts they have with their internal service providers in the event of disruptions. Second, the legislative framework in both countries provides worker representatives at the company level with veto, co-determination and consultation rights on issues that include performance management and job content, as we will spell out in more detail below, and thus prima facie provides them with greater institutional resources than those available to workers in liberal market economies.

In addition to interviews with experts at the industry level, a total of 44 interviews (on-site, in union halls or, in a few instances, by phone), were carried out in the 5 companies in 2016 and 2017, with management at the company and warehouse levels, with employee representatives and, wherever useful and possible, with employees.

In the following two sections, we will analyze the organizational choices of the five companies under study in two areas of work organization: parcelling of work, which correspondingly reduces task discretion and performance management. The first heading of each sub-section will cover the changes to that area of work organization and the second heading will cover the management-labour disputes that followed or accompanied those developments.

Overall, the companies under study do seem to be converging toward one single socio-productive model: the ‘neo-Taylorist’ one. At both conventional and semi-automated warehouses, deskilling has led to a loss of knowledge and autonomy. Digital tools are used to optimize tasks and to prescribe and monitor work activity. Our results show that in France and Germany, as in liberal market economies, a key factor has been the erosion of the workers’ structural power due to supply chain transformations. Thus, contrary to what we had assumed, being an in-house entity rather than an out-sourced 3PL does not seem to make a big difference. Overall, in all our cases, both management and unions were under much pressure from the retailers, and fierce cost-cutting strategies were implemented, as evidenced by redundancies and wage cuts that have assumed various forms in recent years. This context was clearly connected to the union agenda of giving priority to preserving jobs and trying to counter the increase in flexibility requirements and associated casualization.

Nonetheless, in this general context, we found some differences from what we see in liberal market economies. In the warehouses under study, management relied less on “draconian disciplinary policies,” as found for instance by Newsome et al. (2013) at a logistics warehouse in the United Kingdom, or as extensively documented at Amazon warehouses, particularly in English-speaking countries (Harney and Dundon, 2020). Institutional power resources seem to play a role here. Indeed, strong consultation rights in both France and Germany were not enough to make huge differences in job content and associated working conditions, as compared to logistics companies in liberal market economies. But individualized performance monitoring was less coercive mainly because labour law and collective bargaining rights had imposed safeguards. However, to be consequential, some of these rights need to be ‘activated,’ as illustrated by the ‘exit option’ from the performance pay system in one of our German cases. Overall, the capacity to make the most of institutional resources depends on both structural and associational powers. Some role is played by differences in the union’s associational power at the warehouse level. With competing unions and a resulting fragmentation of narrative resources, with lower quality of social dialogue, and with higher segmentation of the labour force and undermining of internal solidarity, it has become more difficult to push for better working conditions in our French cases. In both countries, the deskilling induced by Neo-Taylorism has additionally facilitated casualization of employment and hiring of lower-skilled workers, thereby further contributed to undermine internal solidarity and, therefore, weakening associational power resources.

Beyond the issue of weak power resources, there is another potential explanation: the limited capacities of workers and their representatives to mobilize to promote their interests, or their limited willingness to do so. Established unions and staff representatives may in particular sometimes lack the experience and skills to use their power resources optimally to develop inclusive strategies that transcend organizational boundaries and stretch across the supply chain, as argued for instance by Benvegnú et al. (2018) in the case of the Austrian postal industry. However, in paying more attention to unions’ capacities, we should not downplay the very important role of the economic transformations currently undermining their structural power, as well as the vicious circle eroding their associational power once the path to Neo-Taylorization has been taken.

To conclude, the beneficial—albeit limited—impact of institutional constraints in both countries has not altogether prevented the shift to neo-Taylorism, but it has contributed to somewhat less intense forms of neo-Taylorism. Still, this outcome is hardly satisfying, even though many of the jobs affected might disappear over the long term. Instead of just waiting for robots to come, we should put the issue of humane working environments for low-skilled jobs on the agenda of both governments and companies. That, too, is an important item for the future of work.