Humans in Digital Logistics: Interview and Focus Group Data, 2022-2025

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The Humans in Digital Logistics (HuLog) project investigates the role of digital technologies in reshaping work and employment conditions in warehouses in Europe (across Poland, Germany, Belgium and the UK), in view of identifying guiding principles for a more human-centred and socially sustainable digital warehousing. An essential condition for building a more efficient and resilient European logistics is the improvement of the poor work and employment conditions today prevalent in this sector. The technologies that ensure an as- smooth-as-possible integration of workers into logistics processes, from online purchase to goods delivery, fundamentally shape work and employment in ways that are too often harmful to workers (e.g. through work intensification, health and safety concerns, high turnover rates, increased surveillance). Building on the extant knowledge on the key role of digital technologies in shaping work and employment conditions in logistics, this project innovates by approaching technology as essential to envisioning any improvement of work and employment conditions in logistics. More specifically, HuLog investigates the key role of digital technologies in shaping work and employment conditions in warehouses across Europe in view of making them more human-centred and socially sustainable. The project is structured around three main objectives: Objective 1: To gain an in-depth understanding of how digital warehouse management systems shape workers’ lived experience of the warehouse work. Objective 2: To document and theorise the role of warehouse management systems in co-shaping companies’ human resource management strategies affecting work and employment conditions. Objective 3: To derive an analytical framework comprising guiding principles for envisioning policy fostering human-centred and socially sustainable digital warehousing. This collection includes interview data from the UK (UKRI-funded) branch of the broader European project, encompassing 69 interviews with 92 research respondents.

The Humans in Digital Logistics (HuLog) project investigates how digital technologies shape work and employment conditions in warehouses in Europe. Warehouses are today profoundly affected by rapidly evolving digital technologies along the whole supply chain, which allow online purchases at express delivery, harmonize systems for tracking parcels, and optimize warehouse operations to reduce the time for handling goods. Warehousing is expected to keep growing and to generate new jobs, as companies rise local inventories to mitigate the risk of global supply chain disruptions caused by international trade conflicts (e.g. Brexit) and calamities such as the COVID-19 pandemic. HuLog examines how digital warehouse management systems shape workers' experience of work and drive warehousing companies' employment strategies to maximise workforce flexibility, affecting employment conditions. To date, the impact of digital technologies on work and employment in warehouses remains a neglected field of investigation. Workers are absent from most studies of warehousing, which focuses on increasing efficiency to reduce time and costs. Current knowledge is largely limited to journalistic accounts of work and employment in single companies such as Amazon. HuLog combines a socio-material and an employment relations perspective to study 12 digital warehouses in 4 logistic hubs in Europe: Western Poland, Leipzig-Halle (Germany), Limburg (Belgium) and West Yorkshire (United Kingdom). This research design allows for comparison across institutional, economic and socio-demographic contexts. The HuLog project will produce multidisciplinary, cutting-edge scientific knowledge on work and employment in European logistics, advancing the debate in key disciplines and, more broadly, on the future of work. It will also scientifically support and facilitate policy stakeholders' negotiation of guiding principles for more human-centred and socially sustainable digital warehousing.