The digitalization of retailing is restructuring consumption as well as retail work. Unlike front-line service work in stores, online retail work is defined by indirect service work at a distance from customers at warehouse sites. The rapid pace of change means that knowledge about online retail workplaces and its employees is still fragmentary. Empirically drawing on Swedish national statistics and an ongoing study of five online retail warehouses, this article explores intersections of online retail warehousing, gender and racialization, and meanings of place therein. National statistics show that online retail employs more men and more foreign-born than retailing in general. While retailing is dominated by small workplaces, online retail warehouses are either small or large and the proportion of women and Swedish-born is lower at the larger warehouses than the small ones. Occupational data show that the proportion of women and foreign-born people is significantly lower among online retail managers than among warehouse workers. Further nuances are provided by the qualitative insights from the five studied warehouses. Almost only women worked in the two smaller warehouses, which was explained by references to the nature of the work. At the larger, more gender-balanced warehouses, examples of segregation between employees of the same category were found, as was the importance of place for hierarchies between workers and managers. More so, the study makes evident that place matters also for the boundary making around and between online retail workplaces, especially in relation to racialization processes. While inequality, place and work in retail stores are about conditional access to employment, in online retail warehouses the matter seems to be more about how certain bodies’ lack of mobility and opportunities in the labor market at large left them “stuck” in online retailing.

Online retailing challenges the traditional male coding of warehousing. Based upon an ethnographic study at two Swedish online retail warehouses, this article seeks to understand why certain warehouses are numerically dominated by women. Employees express that men are less focused and more careless and easily bored than women, and hence not desirable for the goods-handling work. The warehouses extend to hard-working women driven by the shame of doing wrong, which reflect their orientation of bodies in the direction of enhancing production and profit. Workers attribute the positive social atmosphere at the warehouses to the numerical dominance of women and the small size of the workplaces. At the one hand, the constructed sameness of (women) workers through hard work and jargon contribute to a collective identity that strengthens them. At the other hand, the binary gendering of work and workers also contribute to making the ware houses into ‘straight spaces’ (Ahmed, 2006).

Sweden is a country where racial/ethnic power relations reflect and reinforce the marginalisation of groups of people. Research has shown that language makes part of such racialised processes through makings of the Swedish language into the norm and a consequent stigmatisation of the ‘non-Swedish’ others. This article explores the role of language in racialisation at the workplace level of online retail warehousing. The empirical material comprises interviews (n = 24) and focus groups (n = 15 groups, tot. of 49 participants) with managers, team leaders, and workers at three online retail warehouses in Sweden, with an emphasis on the perceptions of a Swedish language policy that had been implemented in one of the warehouses. The policy had been implemented to promote inclusion and to create opportunities for workers whose primary language was not Swedish. The article shows that the language policy can be understood as racialising, even though that was not its purpose.

Objectives

Studies in the goods supply chain in areas outside of warehousing show evidence of gender and racial/ethnic inequalities in working conditions (i.e. in work organization, work environment, and employment conditions). This review aimed to identify, summarize, and discuss research focused on inequality in warehousing and its effects on warehouse working conditions. In the review, racial/ethnic inequality includes inequality related to country of birth and (im)migration status.

Methods

We performed a systematic search in the Scopus and Web of Science databases to identify warehouse studies that addressed working conditions and (in)equality at a workplace level. Screening of records was performed using the Rayyan systematic review tool. Risk of bias was assessed according to established methods and checklists.

Results

Database searches yielded 4910 articles. After title-abstract-keyword and full-text screenings, 21 articles were included. Results showed inequality based on gender and race/ethnicity in both work organization (different tasks were performed by different groups of employees), work environment conditions (physical and psychosocial aspects differed), and employment conditions (disparate employment types and incomes between groups of employees). Health differences, as a possible result of unequal working conditions, were evident between different racial/ethnic groups of employees. A hierarchy that included both gender and race/ethnicity was found, with (im)migrant and racialized women positioned at the bottom.

Conclusions

We found evidence that gender and race/ethnicity influenced work organization, work environment conditions, and employment conditions. Evidence was found for an intersection between gender and race/ethnicity. To improve working conditions, and subsequently occupational health, we encourage researchers to simultaneously consider gender and race/ethnicity factors at work, and to consider both why inequality is present and how it impacts working conditions in future studies of warehousing, particularly in online retailing.