Claiming Workplace Citizenship: “Worker” Legacies, Collective Identities and Divided Loyalties of South African Contingent Retail Workers

Abstract

Casual and contract employment increased in South African food retailing in the 1990s, opening divisions of labor on shop floors among black workers previously unified. Literature on labor mobilization concentrates on institutional strategies to organize contingent workers. Explaining new segmentation among retail workers, this paper finds that a notion of what it meant to be a "worker" is also relevant for explaining obstacles to mobilization. "Worker" legacies were shaped in the 1980s and carried forward with shifting emphases in the post-apartheid period. These processes reproduced a normative notion of worker as full-time, permanent employee and labor rights as codified in a narrowed employment relationship. Casual and contract workers experienced work as a series of exclusions from rights and respect within the workplace vis-à-vis permanent workers. Contingent workers protested their marginalization by reclaiming their inclusion within workplace relations, within a workplace citizenship. In the process, divisions of labor deepened.

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“…3 The majority of the respondents were women, thirty-five years of age or younger, and all were "black." 3 The majority of the respondents were women, thirty-five years of age or younger, and all were "black."…”

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“…Workers claimed not the market as terrain of inclusion, but the workplace (see Kenny, forthcoming). The polity was imagined in the workplace, as the figure of the 'black worker' struggled for citizenship via the workplace, indeed winning many labour rights eventually codified in post-apartheid labour law (Kenny 2007).…”

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“…They were relatively well educated, and they were politically conscious, many schooled in the Black Consciousness Movement and politicized in the 1976 student uprisings. 67 While retail jobs had begun to be deskilled by the 1980s through task fragmentation, nevertheless, black workers' new jobs in clerical and service work required a level of literacy, numeracy, and proficiency in English, which they confidently exhibited. They organized as black workers, firmly understanding that their specific problems of class The Regime of Contract in South African Retailing and race defined their collective experience as different from their colleaguesin particular white women.…”