New dawn or end of labour?: from South Africa’s East Rand to Ekurhuleni

Webster, Edward; Englert, Thomas

doi:10.1080/14747731.2019.1652465

Cited by 6 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Yet, unions have often failed to effectively represent contingent workers, and this has led to alternative forms of representation. For example, Community Health Workers on short term contracts set up their own union and workers forum to voice their demands (Hlatshwayo, 2018), and labour NGOs such as the Casual Workers Advice Office helped to set up the Simunye Workers Forum to represent workers employed through labour brokers (Webster & Englert, 2020). As explained below, in this respect, there are some similarities with China, in that both are characterised by strong relationships between in‐work and outside of work politics and voice.…”

Section: Conceptualising Voice In the Majority World: South Africa An...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptualising employee voice in the majority world: Using multiple intellectual traditions inspired by the work of Mick Marchington

Dibben

Cunningham

Bakalov

et al. 2022

Human Res Mgmt Journal

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Section: Conceptualising Voice In the Majority World: South Africa An...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptualising employee voice in the majority world: Using multiple intellectual traditions inspired by the work of Mick Marchington

Dibben

Cunningham

Bakalov

et al. 2022

Human Res Mgmt Journal

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“…This has largely happened outside of trade unions, either independently or with the assistance of advice offices like the CWAO (Rees, 2019). Employers, of course, have pursued multiple strategies to evade their legal responsibilities either through simply refusing to comply (Webster and Englert, 2020) or through challenging the interpretation of the rules all the way to the Constitutional Court (Constitutional Court, 2018;Smit, 2018). Accelerating forms of externalisation and casualisation have been another strategy.…”

Section: New Rights For Labour Broker Workersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Precarious Workers and the Labour Process: Problematising the Core/Non-core

Dor

Runciman

2022

GLJ

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This article recentres labour process theory in the analysis of the South African manufacturing sector to challenge the perception that precarious workers in the formal economy are largely “flexible extras” unrelated to the “core” of production. Through case study analysis of two manufacturing workplaces in Gauteng, South Africa, we demonstrate how precarious workers are both core to production and to the production of surplus value. Our analysis demonstrates how employers have increasingly restructured work through reclassifying large parts of the labour process as “non-core”. This trend has accelerated in recent years as employers seek to evade new legal responsibilities following amendments to the Labour Relations Act in 2014. Despite employers’ attempts to redefine the labour of precarious workers as non-core, we demonstrate that these workers nevertheless play an increasingly central role in the valorisation regimes of manufacturing companies – rendering them core to the production of surplus value for manufacturing capital. Our analysis problematises Von Holdt and Webster’s (2005) core/non-core schema for analysing the South African labour force, which locates precarious workers in the formal sector in the non-core. We argue that while this schema has some utility in describing the make-up of the labour force, its abstraction from an analysis of the labour process obscures the fact that precarious work has become central to manufacturing capital’s valorisation strategy. Finally, the article reflects on how precarious workers are attempting to organise within and in parallel to trade unions. This analysis highlights the importance of going beyond analysing trade unions if we are to contribute to rebuilding the labour movement under conditions of precarity. KEYWORDS: labour-process theory; precarious work; surplus value; labour movement; manufacturing; South Africa

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“…Second, the proliferation of precarious forms of work and the early focus on organising strategies and forms of representation of these workers has expanded in recent years. Researchers argue that as a predominant labour force, while vulnerable, these workers have new opportunities for organising because of the increasing reliance on their labour, as with community healthcare workers (Hlatshwayo, 2018) or because of newly identified bargaining power, including how it has been shaped by labour process changes (Dickinson, 2017;Englert and Runciman, 2019;Webster and Englert, 2020). These engagements returned to South Africa studies through debates around labour market and workplace bargaining power, as influenced by Beverly Silver's (2003) Forces of Labor, and through the expanded focus on 'power resources' of workers (Schmalz et al, 2018).…”

Section: The Return To Labour Process Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Such a focus combines workers' power in the market, in their location within the organisation of work, and in the institutional, political and social fields. Thus, these scholars argue that precarious workers by virtue of changes to work monopolise strategic positionings within the labour process, which in turn explains new forms of organising, in these cases outside more traditional union formations, but drawing on the strength of workers' collective experiences beyond the individual employer (Webster and Englert, 2020). In other examples, precarious migrant workers, including many women, who by virtue of their new role as wage earners (even if tentative) gain power within households.…”

Section: The Return To Labour Process Studiesmentioning

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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New dawn or end of labour?: from South Africa’s East Rand to Ekurhuleni

Cited by 6 publications

References 12 publications

Conceptualising employee voice in the majority world: Using multiple intellectual traditions inspired by the work of Mick Marchington

Conceptualising employee voice in the majority world: Using multiple intellectual traditions inspired by the work of Mick Marchington

Precarious Workers and the Labour Process: Problematising the Core/Non-core

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

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