Rural Women Demand Meaningful Representation in Local Government

Motala, S.

doi:10.2307/4066312

Cited by 1 publication

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“…US debates on revitalisation of the labour movement returned to South African traditions of social movement unionism and influenced South African scholars grappling with the political implications of an institutionalised trade union movement struggling to find a new modus operandi (von Holdt, 2002;Buhlungu, 2010). In South Africa, extended studies of precarious and informal labour examined conditions and looked to these cases for new organising insights (Horn, 2005;Motala, 2008;Bonner and Spooner, 2011;Kenny, 2011;Webster, 2011). The informal economy was framed within labour market issues, as a source of inequality through access to the market and a need for recognition and less on how work itself was organised (Webster et al, 2017).…”

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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