Selling selves: East Rand retail sector workers fragmented and reconfigured

Abstract

Journal of Southern African StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:This article examines the changing labour market and labour process in South African food retailing. It shows that black workers replaced white women in front-line jobs in the 1970s, changed the workplace order, and unified workers around a common collective race and class identity. The article argues, however, that militant and unified East Rand black shop workers became fragmented and marginalised by the late 1990s. The growth of casualisation and subcontracting helps to explain shifting political subjectivities of how these processes became embedded in broader social meanings constituting service work.

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

“…The industry historically imagined this employment form as "extra-ordinary" labor to be used for particularly busy monthly or seasonal periods (Kenny 2005a). In practice, many employers did not pay casual workers at higher wage rates, and they worked for years as weekly paid "temporary" staff (Kenny 2004).…”

“…Union struggles forced a reexamination of labor rights, and in the 1980s, the independent unions organized to bring their black memberships in to full workplace inclusion (von Holdt 2003). Retail workers mobilized against poor conditions as well as racist relations within corporate South African chains (Kenny 2004).…”

“…These divisions have fragmented a formerly strong and unified black union membership. The main union in the sector-the South African Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers Union (SACCAWU)-has been relatively unsuccessful at combating this segmentation and the decline in conditions across all employment categories (Kenny 2004;Clarke 2006). What explains the persistence of these divisions of labor, and what implications are there for labor mobilization?…”

Voluntary employee reporting by the wholesale and retail companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange

“…In the 1970s, the retail sector labour market changed substantially (Kenny, 2004). White women left front-line jobs to be replaced by black women.…”

“…Between 1965 and1990, the number of black men and women in routine white-collar employment continued to increase while total white employment in these occupations declined after 1979. Young white women entered better paying service jobs in finance and the public sector (Kenny, 2004 Before South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994, the major trade union federation, COSATU entered into an alliance with the African National Congress (ANC) and has subsequently played a key role in many areas of policy-making (Cooper, 2005). When the ANC was elected into government in 1994, it had to invite the union's representative to government, for example people like Jay Naidoo, Cyril Ramaphosa, Kgalema Motlanthe and few others (Bezuidenhout & Buhlungu, 2008).…”