
ALT Abstract: This paper investigates how the digitalisation of work reconfigures the understanding of workers, their labour, and their value. Drawing on technoableism theory, which foregrounds how technologies establish new normative, disabling standards of capability, we analyse the shifting ontology of the worker in digitally intensive workplaces. We base our study on extensive qualitative data collected with managers, workers, trade union representatives, technology providers, labour market intermediaries, and local authorities across 12 warehouses in three European logistic hubs. Our analysis shows how warehouse workers are problematized as fallible, defective productive resources through systematic comparison with digital technologies, and how these latter are conversely constructed as necessary to enhance, fix and “save” them. In this way, a negative ontology of the human as disabled, generic labour power, holding at best residual “soft” skills






