While recognizing that women are part of the most vulnerable sections of migrant communities, the article affirms their social agency by locating their responses to difficulties they face as migrants within a framework of precarious resistance. Based on indepth interviews with Zimbabwean migrant women working in Johannesburg, South Africa, the article discusses a duality of precarious work and precarious resistance. Women who would have been carers of families at their homes in Zimbabwe, and been supported financially by men who worked in the cities like Johannesburg, are now breadwinners who take risks by travelling to Johannesburg in search of work. The first aspect dealt with in this paper narrates problems faced by the women when travelling to Johannesburg. Being women doubles the risk in a way as the women have to deal with violence against women and generalized lack of basic services and goods like those necessary for female hygiene and washing facilities. Arriving in Johannesburg means the beginning of a new struggle of searching for work and finding work which tends to be precarious. As a response to this precariousness, the second aspect of this duality comes into play where the female workers amass strategies and tactics which are defined as precarious resistance, because they are individualized and isolated. However, networks play a major role in anchoring precarious resistance of the women migrants who work as precarious workers in Johannesburg.

This article examines the psychology of migrant learners’ resilience, their right to education, and how migrant organizations and South African civil society are supporting and reinforcing the agency of migrant learners and their parents. It is based on a year-long study conducted by researchers at the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Education Rights and Transformation (CERT), funded by the Foundation for Human Rights. Testimonies, participatory workshops, surveys, interviews, and focus groups with learners, parents, educators, officials, and civil society activists in three South African provinces were studied––Gauteng, Limpopo, and the Western Cape––spanning rural, urban, and township areas. The article is framed by the traumatic experiences of migrant learners before entering South Africa, during their stay, and often when they are deported. Topics covered in the testimonies include children’s rights to, and in education, they also traverse gender issues, the travails of unaccompanied minors, and obstacles preventing migrants’ participation in schooling and society.

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Based on in-depth interviews largely with women working as community health workers (CHWs) and documents, the article shines the spotlight on CHWs, who remain a blind spot in the literature on South African labour studies. Abandoned by mainstream unions and often ignored by labour scholars, the article reveals that CHW workers are crafting their own nascent organisational responses as women and as precarious workers to their conditions. New organisational responses led by women who carry most of the social and economic burden are beginning to contest their conditions of precariousness by using tools such as strikes. Les nouvelles luttes des travailleurs précaires en Afrique du Sud : l'émergence de réponses organisationnelles de la part des agents de santé communautaires RÉSUMÉ Basé sur des interviews approfondies réalisées en grande partie avec des femmes travaillant comme agents de santé communautaires, ainsi que sur des documents, cet article met en lumière ces agents de santé qui demeurent absentes de la littérature des études sur le travail en Afrique du Sud. Abandonnées par les syndicats dominants et souvent ignorées des chercheurs dans le domaine du travail, l'article révèle que ces agents de santé communautaires, en tant que femmes et en tant que travailleuses précaires, sont en train d'élaborer leurs propres réponses organisationnelles adaptées à leurs conditions. De nouvelles réponses organisationnelles menées par des femmes, qui portent la plus grande partie du fardeau social et économique, commencent à contester leur condition précaire à travers l'utilisation de moyens tels que les grèves.

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Scholarship on the Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) in South Africa tends to focus on quantitative evaluation to measure the progress made in the implementation of EPWP projects. The number of employment opportunities created by EPWP, demographic profiling, skills acquired by beneficiaries and training opportunities related to the Programme form the basis of typical statistical evaluations of it, but exclude comment by the workers who participate in its projects. Based on primary sources, including in-depth interviews, newspaper reports and internet sources, this article seeks to provide a qualitative review of the EPWP from the perspective of the beneficiaries of municipal EPWP projects. Various South African government sectors hire EPWP workers to provide local services such as cleaning and maintaining infrastructure, but the employment of these workers can still be regarded as precarious, in the sense that they have no job security, earn low wages and have no benefits such as medical aid or pension fund. The interviewees indicated that, although they appreciate the temporary employment opportunities provided by the EPWP, they also experience health and safety risks and lack the advantages of organised labour groupings. Their main disadvantage, however, is that they cannot access permanent employment, which offers better wages and concomitant benefits.