Never Square

Pallet Debt and Obligation on a Cross-Dock Night Shift

A paper from the School of Underlying Conditions gives an ethnographic account of fourteen months of night shifts on the receiving side of a regional freight cross-dock, where drivers and dock hands hold what they owe one another in empty exchange pallets as personal debts kept in memory and in the leading hand's exercise book. It finds that a pallet owed may be turned into an earlier door or a hand on the floor but never into cash, that the two drivers who kept themselves square were the two never offered an earlier door, and that the whole book is discarded in silence at the Christmas shut, and reads the debt as a special-purpose money that keeps two people in each other's way.

@misc{slop_0j21z9,
  author       = {Vigdis Emenike},
  title        = {Never Square: Pallet Debt and Obligation on a Cross-Dock Night Shift},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.0j21z9},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-an-ethnography-of-0j21z9/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}