From Insurrectionary Worker to Contingent Citizen: restructuring labor markets and repositioning East Rand (South Africa) retail sector workers

Abstract

Cities in South Africa, engineered as they were through apartheid, have fundamentally defined experiences of work, residence, leisure, and collective organization of urban and rural dwellers alike. Within the distinctive spaces of urban centers, citizens encounter the more recent difficulties of global economic restructuring as well as the potential to create their own opposition to increased marginalization. Using workplace interviews and life histories conducted from 1998‐2000 of retail sector workers on the East Rand, South Africa, this paper focuses on the changing “local labor market.” From a focal point of an organized, democratic union movement linked to community anti‐apartheid struggles, more recently the region has undergone de‐industrialization exacerbated by increasing “flexibilized” service employment and directed investment to other centers, like Johannesburg's rapidly developing north. The article explores how East Rand worker‐residents experience an increasingly contingent labor market through shifting identities as workers and as men and women. [South Africa, retail industry, East Rand, deindustrialization, labor markets, gender, globalization]

The Practice of Waiting under Closure in Palestine

“…Scholars examined forms of segregation in the Americas and elsewhere (Davis 1990, 1992; Caldeira 2000; Low 2001, 2003; Mitchell 1999; Kuppinger 2004; Czegledy 2004; Kenny 2003; Gregory 2004). Most of this work focuses more on space and planning than on movement within the built environment.…”

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

“…2 On the East Rand, where these retail workers lived, the local labor market restructured with manufacturing decline and the growth of contingent service employment (Barchiesi and Kenny 2002). In the 1980s, these workers' households had multiple members working, but by the 1990s, they relied on fewer and more insecure wages (Kenny 2003). A continuing housing shortage, woefully under-addressed by state subsidization programs (Bond 2000), and the privatization of services, like electricity and water, have made working class households more vulnerable in the post-apartheid period (MacDonald and Pape 2002).…”

“…While these conditions have produced new social movements within working class communities (Ballard et al 2006), many remain small and tenuous; workers who I interviewed instead felt increasingly individualized within their residential areas (Kenny 2003). Those earning a scarce wage came to support multiple household members.…”

“…While labor brokers increased their social reproductive vulnerability, contract workers did not make claims against employers or retailers through mobilizing these concerns. Indeed, being a man required them to cope with provisioning difficulties (see Kenny 2003). Like permanent workers, they marginalized concerns of social reproduction by marking casuals categorically as dependent and vulnerable.…”

“…Elsewhere I consider more closely workers' household and residential situations (Kenny 2003). In the 1990s, these workers did not build collective political identities in places of residence while they have consistently maintained collective formulations within their workplaces.…”