The South African labour movement

Kenny, Bridget

doi:10.11606/0103-2070.ts.2020.166288

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 34 publications

(36 reference statements)

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“…By the turn of the decade South Africa's organised labour movement had become fragmented, yet trade unions and workers nevertheless represent an enduring political formation in South Africa, now in multiple forms compared to the immediate postapartheid period (Kenny, 2020).…”

Section: Labour Markets and Precariousnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

The return of the labour process: race, skill and technology in South African labour studies

Kenny

Webster

2021

Work in the Global Economy

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From its beginnings, the sociology of work in South Africa has been preoccupied with three enduring themes: skill/deskilling, racism in the workplace, and Fordism/racial Fordism. With the advent of democracy in the 1990s there was a shift away from studying the labour process. We argue in this article that there has been a return to taking seriously the ways new forms of work in this postcolonial context pose new questions to the global study of work. A central preoccupation in the study of work has been the racialised reinscription of post-apartheid workplace orders, now in the context of new dynamics of externalisation and casualisation of employment. Another important theme is the shift away from studies of the formal sector workplace and toward the broader implications of the precarianisation and informalisation of labour. This focus coincided with the growth of new social movements by mostly unemployed (black) township residents around state services provision. This includes studies on working-class politics more broadly, with attention focusing on questions of organising and mobilising. More recently this interest in precarious labour has grown into studies of the gig economy, returning to earlier themes of technology and skill, as well as new forms of waged labour and wagelessness. We argue for the ongoing salience of labour process studies for understanding the specific issues of the securing and obscuring of value, and through the articulations of ‘racial capitalism’ offered by the long tradition of labour studies in South Africa.

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Section: Labour Markets and Precariousnessmentioning

confidence: 99%