Abstract
Worn Out examines how technology deployed by fast fashion corporations exploit, surveil, and shape the lives of its retail workers, as they forge communities of resistance to pursue more equitable futures. The author frames these concerns through five major chapters that address the global shifts in the fast fashion industry after the COVID-19 pandemic. The introduction presents key observations that form the through-lines of the book: norms of retail work, automated work schedules, digital surveillance, entrenched precarity, policing of working bodies, labor resistance, and organizing. The monograph’s contribution within the critiques of fast fashion is its focus on examining technologies of selling, which dovetails the extensive and valuable scholarship that critiques production and consumption of fast fashion. The digital infrastructures of fast fashion exacerbate the working conditions of retail workers—long working hours, unfeasible scheduling systems, digital surveillance, and other tools that keep workers steeped in precarity. The author thereafter locates their sites of ethnographic inquiry within various spaces of the sales floor and examines the diverse technologies that harness retail workers’ capacities.
Chapters 1 and 2 focus on fast fashion corporations’ reliance on technology, their rise to prominence in the global garment industry, and the consequent impact of this reliance on retail employees’ experiences of working in sales, managerial control over worker time, and futile claims of maximizing efficiency and productivity. The author presents an intriguing ethnographic account of process of application and hiring within two unnamed fast fashion brands in New York City. It forms an effectual introduction to the ways that corporate structure erodes boundaries of personal time and demands flexibility that feels brutalizing. Readers are introduced to how third-party technologies like Kronos are utilized by corporations to not only predict the production and restocking patterns in stores, but also to automate workers schedules based on predicted customer demand (p. 36). This automation necessitates retail workers’ adherence to the design of just-in-time workflows that exploit digital technologies to make their labor available and flexible around the clock. The author points out various moments when they falter: overestimation of predictions of sales, mistakes in retail work schedules, bad productivity ratios, to name a few. The façade of machine-like efficiency is further dismantled when the author reveals how it becomes impossible even for store managers to keep track of their workers’ schedules, thereby showcasing how retail workers’ and their supervisors’ ontology graze against the technological temporality that the fast fashion industry wishes to implement.
Chapters 3 and 4 study the ways in which digital and surveillance technology shape retail workers’ labor on the sales floors, and how their lives are tracked and measured within and beyond the store. Crucially, the author notes that in the case of their monograph, the work of the fast fashion retail worker can be more precisely described as being automated, rather than managed. The author connects this to a conspicuous shift in norms and practices of fast fashion retail—the labor of the retail worker is not driven by a need to sell; that is usually based in hospitable and warm customer interactions and a keen knowledge of knowing and discerning customer preferences. Instead, in this form of retail work, customer interaction is seen as a distraction. Since consumer behavior, stock demand, and inventory are known and automated through predictive technologies, the labor of the retail worker is similarly automated to focus on cleanliness, the superficial frontage of organization and avoidance of customer interaction, all to keep the sales floor in functioning order (p. 80). While retail workers are not expected to meet sales targets (seeing how the clothes “sell themselves”), they do bear the brunt of customer dissatisfaction through verbal comments, altercations, and are even singled out in online reviews. The author does not untangle the impact of how retail workers, despite not being technically accountable to the corporations regarding customer satisfaction, do in fact face, mediate, and de-escalate conflicts arising from this shift in practices and the “demise of interactive selling” (p. 7).
Within chapter 4, the author presents startling similarities between the technology used to govern workers and those used by military and police institutions, as evidenced by an ethnographic account of the 2016 National Retail Federation’s conference for loss prevention. Returning to their experience of being hired at a fast fashion brand, they note how access to workers’ biometric details is used to log workhours and measure wages. Moreover, workers are compelled to consent to the surveillance of their social media as one of the conditions of these jobs (p. 119), thus allowing management to manipulate a sense of trust among workers (p. 121). This interest in the appearance of workers in cyberspace also extends to the physical sales floor, where discriminatory practices abound when it comes to workers’ appearances.
In Worn Out, the looming shadow of malfunctioning technology would not be missed on any reader. These failures alert readers to the ways in which retail workers forge their own forms of resistance. The author ties these moments of resistance to larger organizing and activist efforts for worker safety and equity. They form a segue to chapter 5 wherein the author focuses on “retail disruptions” (p. 149) as a strategy shared by worker centers to draw attention to inequities created by and in relation to consumption, profit, techno-precarity, and labor exploitation (p. 151). The possibility of such a critical data praxis (p. 179) that is entrenched in just and equitable futures may seem distant to the reader; however, the author directs the reader’s attention toward existing worker-led strategies as potential sources of change. Worn Out is a riveting ethnographic study that would be best suited to a general audience and to undergraduate classes within the social sciences. Graduate students and scholars might find that it occasionally compromises upon analytical rigor, theoretical grounding, disciplinary interventions, and methodological considerations in favor of accessibility. Despite its few shortcomings, Worn Out offers an illuminating ethnographic exploration of the interplay between technology and labor in the fast fashion industry, making it an invaluable read for anyone seeking a nuanced understanding of the challenges retail workers face in an increasingly automated world.
