THE WAREHOUSE REGIME IN MOTION: AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF RACE, EXPLOITATION AND RESISTANCE IN THE SHEFFIELD CITY REGION

This thesis contributes to an understanding of logistics political economy. It combines the circuit of
capital, a multiscalar regime and the labour process with an embodied covert ethnographic exploration
of two warehouses in the Sheffield City Region. Adopting a racial capitalism lens, it focuses on the
UK's border regime and the Sheffield City Region's local labour market to develop an understanding
of exploitation and resistance in two warehouses.

The research outlines the reproduction of a racialised reserve army in the Sheffield City Region. It
shows that the combination of state immigration policy and local labour market conditions has
disciplined and fractioned the working class in the Sheffield City Region. State immigration policy
and labour market conditions have created two distinct micro-regions. The first is based in a former
mining town, characterised by labour's reduced mobility; the other is in an inner-city neighbourhood
characterised by a high degree of regional and international circulation. Management uses variation in
workers' mobility power to create a racial division of labour, increase competition between migrant-
refugee and non-migrant labour, and intensify production. However, these conditions also lead to
resistance in the workplace, conceptualised as mobility-effort bargaining.

This thesis adds to the current body of literature by examining the interconnectedness of race and
logistics political economy by arguing and illustrating how the state's disciplining of migrant, refugee
and British warehouse workers provides capital with a flexible and disposable reserve army to
establish their exploitation in production. Second, it restores labour to the centre of political economy
by integrating the labour process and labour regime within the circuit of capital. The analysis of the
two case studies of a third-party logistics firm and an international retailer with its own in-house
logistics provides important insights into race and labour relations in the UK's logistics industry and
its implications for labour and collective organisation.