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

Abstract

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.

Racial Capitalism and Global Labour Studies – a Missed Encounter ?

“…Racial hierarchies, in other words, are central for ideological and social control in fomenting alliances between dominant classes and parts of the dominated classes, something that can be at work within a national social formation, but also as a transnational relationship, such as competition between Chinese and European steel workers embodied in the recent campaign of Industriall Europe against importing Chinese steel. Importantly, while such a white alliance is also at work in countries other than the US, where the majority of the population self-defines as Black, as in Brazil or in South Africa, such a white cross-class alliance will necessarily take different forms and use different strategies in those countries (See Kenny andWebster, 2021, on South Africa andSilva, 2019, on Brazil).…”

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

“…At the Lonmin platinum mine, 34 miners were killed and 78 were seriously injured, with 10 others killed in the days leading up to the strike, including non-striking miners, security guards and police officers. In order to understand the tensions underlying strikes, there have, more recently, been calls to engage with LPT to explore deskilling, racism and racial Fordism in the context of new social movements by unemployed black township residents, the increased casualisation of employment and the informalisation of labour (Kenny & Webster, 2021). To illustrate their suggestion, these authors refer to Chinguno's (2013) analysis of how a contributory factor to the strikes that eventuated in the Marikana Massacre was the fragmentation of labour along lines of skill, gender and race.…”

The remaking of working classes: digital labour platforms and workers’ struggles in the Global South

“…The first is how platform business models are redefining the work process and the conditions of work. Here, labour process theory is particularly relevant because it allows us to identify both the points of value production and the sources of working-class power (Kenny and Webster, 2021). The second is the transformative possibilities and limitations of emerging forms of worker organisation in the (re)making of working classes (Silver, 2003).…”