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Labor historiography in the contexts of modern racial slavery and emancipation has long placed changes in the status of work at the core of the very meaning of captivity and freedom, their epochal watersheds, and institutionalized or unintended overlaps. Reviewing, in this journal's pages, recent scholarship on the relations between slavery and capitalism, James Oakes summarized that the “crucial differences between the political economy of slave and free labor … ultimately led to a catastrophic Civil War and one of the most violent emancipations in the hemisphere.” The literature Oakes critically discussed exemplifies the growing academic interest in the multifarious functionality of coerced production for the development of global capitalism. The resulting picture reaches much further than mere questions of economic causality, or whether chattel slavery did kick-start the profitability of capitalism, rather than the other way around. At stake are explanations of how racial captivity—which liberal economic, political, and moral discourse deems an anachronism—shapes the very productive, financial, social, institutional, and philosophical foundations of the global present. Historic and contemporary activist resistance to recurring and ubiquitous waves of antiblack violence, as well as the increasingly self-confident affirmation of white supremacy across Western states and civil societies has rendered such dilemmas in starker terms, asking whether persistent echoes of racial slavery are symptoms that the system is “built this way” rather than being just “broken.”

The rise, in the Western academia of the second half of the twentieth century, of “social movements” as a distinct object of disciplinary expertise has largely ignored or sidestepped the politics of contention and conflict in colonial and postcolonial Africa. Even attempts at providing comprehensive scholarly overviews of African social movements have been few and far between, reflecting the uneasy discrepancy between social movement studies as a field aiming at conceptual and methodological coherence and the exceeding complexity of African contentious politics. Black thought is challenging the study of African social movements to reject the mechanical internalization of concepts and theories that are not accountable to, again in Fanon’s terms, “the lived experience of Blackness.” Placing Africa in relation to global Blackness and Black theory highlights the limitations of such approaches when confronted to power that ordinarily takes the form of lethal and gratuitous violence rather than the hegemonic solicitation of consent or even the capitalistically enforced necessity of producing surplus.

The concepts of ‘precarity’ and ‘informality’ have become prominent ways of characterizing the adverse employment impacts of global market liberalization. In sociological terms, the word ‘precariat’ is often used to identify vulnerable populations forced to depend on unprotected and unstable jobs. By referring to both the insecurity of employment conditions and related broader social dislocations and inequalities, ‘precarity’ has tended to mirror the notion of the ‘informal economy’, largely applied to societies in the global South. The International Labour Organization initially used ‘informal’, with a focus on juridical norms, to define undocumented and unregulated activities, largely performed as self-employment. More recently, however, ‘informality’ has come to characterize unprotected occupations in a broader sense, or jobs lacking security and social provisions, even when performed within a legally ‘formal’ sector or in a subordinate relationship towards certified enterprises. In older capitalist countries and emerging economies alike, the expansion of informal employment is crucially shaped by outsourcing and casualization in established companies, which explains the conceptual convergence of informality and precariousness. Such changes decisively question the idea, which played an important role when the notion of the ‘informal sector’ first emerged in the 1970s, that a socio-economic dualism exists between waged and irregular employment. In the early twenty-first century, precarious and informal work have spurred policy interventions and political strategies by labour and social movements. Collective mobilizations of precarious workers have emphasized that wage labour is failing as a conduit to and guarantor of social integration, citizenship rights, redistributive compacts and subjective stability. Yet the alternative, broadly inspired by a once-triumphant Keynesianism, of a harmonious and equitable wage-based social order has also faded as critics of the welfare state point to its environmentally damaging productivism, gender biases in favour of male breadwinning and narrow national focus of citizenship. To the extent that they question the idea of wage labour as a standard and universal social norm, the concepts of precarity and informality usefully introduce this chapter's discussion of Africa in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a context in which capitalist production regimes have not led to employment relations typically characterized by stable and protected wage earning.

The transition to democracy in South Africa has seen trends towards what can be defined as a growing institutionalisation of labour, meaning that trade unions have been increasingly participating in social and political institutionalised bargaining, both in policy making and industrial restructuring. Dinga Sikwebu grew up in Cape Town and left school in 1978 having received an early political education from the radicalisation that swept South African schools after the 1976 Soweto uprising. John Appolis is Wits regional secretary of the Chemical, Energy, Paper, Printing, Wood and Allied Workers Union. John had been an anti-apartheid activist in his youth and studied at the University of the Western Cape. John is also the chairperson of the Gauteng Anti-Privatisation Forum, which unites and co-ordinates the struggles of community organisations located in the townships of Soweto, East Rand, Vaal and Alexandra. Sectoral Employment Training Authorities are bodies established in 2001 to develop systems of skill acquisition and recognition of skills by industry.

A normative association of waged work with ideas of dignity and personal responsibility was central to the elaboration of the ‘labour question’ by the institutions of white rule in early 20th-century South Africa. Colonial work ethic sustained representations of the ‘native’ as a productive agent for whom promises of progress and modernisation (deriving from economic interdependence) contrasted with the deepening of political subjugation and racialised despotism. The respectability that was putatively linked to working for wages served to define the ‘native’ in opposition to what the white state perceived as a more threatening blackness, averse to wage labour and incompatible with the country’s colonial situation. Nascent African nationalism articulated its claims (albeit with significant ambiguities), against the background of such ideational oppositions. Ideals of productive Africans as virtuous subjects of the white-ruled polity simultaneously disguised and underpinned modalities of structural violence...

This article offers an investigation of social policy discourse with specific regard to the ways in which interventions aimed at addressing poverty and social inequality have conceptualised welfare, social assistance and social security. It argues that the post-1994 African National Congress (ANC)-led government has placed a priority on waged employment and labour market participation as the preferred route to social inclusion and social security, to the detriment of universal redistributive programmes not associated with paid work. The state’s promotion of a form of social disciplining centred on wage labour has clashed with the material reality of spiralling unemployment and the proliferation of precarious and unprotected occupations. This disjuncture raises important questions concerning the capacity of the new institutional dispensation to govern South Africa’s long transition – or even the ability of the ANC to justify their policy decisions to their core constituency.

In twentieth-century South African history, from the consolidation of a racially hierarchical social order to the country's transition to democracy, ideologies and policies linking work to welfare have defined the precarious predicament of blackness in highly specific ways. Experiences of state formation and capitalist development under white rule made “natives” the target of normative interventions predicated upon the “dignity of work” as a self-justifying imperative. Therefore, while for whiteness work was allowed to operate as a foundation of socially inclusive citizenship compacts, blacks confronted ideas of wage labor and welfare as paradigmatically coincidental, to the exclusion of further expectations. Moreover, images of personal responsibility and community life attached to work ethics have shaped the imagination of African nationalist politics and its claims to emancipation. As a result, South Africa's racial order articulated two mutually exclusive modalities of being African. One is the “native” as a subject premising a politics of recognition and popular sovereignty on economic activity and participation. The other, antagonistically opposed by the former, is the black, cast as a threatening and unpredictable entity on account of its aversion to capitalist employment. The centering of African desire and well-being around labor not only has played a decisive role in structuring sociopolitical conflicts in contemporary South Africa. It also has underpinned modalities of subjugation, suffering, and invisibility that continue to manifest themselves in the violence and lethality that still pervade black workers' lives, a most dramatic example of which was, in 2012, the police killing of strikers at the Marikana platinum mine.

This chapter argues that the typicality of precariousness in colonial and postcolonial Africa was not confined to labour exploitation and control, but also characterized African workers' responses to waged employment. The precariousness of work in Africa thus undermines working for wages as a putatively progressive norm as well as a social condition through which capital reproduces itself. The precariousness of African work is 'post' colonial to the extent that it has challenged imaginaries of rule – emerged in the colonial context and transmitted to independent nation states – geared at positing wage labour as a condition to make Africans governable and productive. The changing precarity of work thus becomes symptomatic of a more general precariousness of capitalism in the neoliberal age. Neoliberal postmodernity validated in the end the persistence of hierarchies premised on despotism, nepotism, and servitude, which ironically superseded the modern wage form and its institutionalization in colonial and post-independence states.

During South Africa's first decade of democracy, policies of social inclusion and social citizenship have emphasized productive employment and the work ethic in a context of fiscal discipline and public spending thrift. The government's institutional discourse contrasts, however, with a social reality in which most black workers have confronted growing economic precariousness and the inability of waged occupations to provide stable livelihoods above poverty levels. The article discusses workers' responses to these conditions with case studies of private and public employment. It finds that official rhetoric about the centrality of productive employment does not reflect the diversity of practices and discourses with which workers address the crisis facing wage labor.

The 2002 report of the Taylor Committee of Inquiry into a Comprehensive Social Security System for South Africa recommended widespread social policy changes. A key suggestion in the report was the phased introduction of a Basic Income Grant (BIG) on a universal, non-means tested basis. In this way, the report addressed widespread demands by labour and civil society organisations for a form of income to be provided independently from individual employment conditions. The BIG concept recognises that existing social security programmes are related to stable waged employment and therefore exclude increasing numbers of long-term unemployed and contingent workers. This article argues that current shifts in the country's policy discourse question earlier social policies, which saw social inclusion as primarily depending on labour market participation. At the same time, however, the extremely cautious approach to the BIG contained in the Taylor report reflects a government approach that continuously praises work ...

The scholarly literature on the South African democratic transition generally recognizes the decisive role of organized labor and black trade union organizations in the collapse of the apartheid regime. Labor's contribution in this regard was premised on a view of liberation that was not limited to the achievement of political rights and civil liberties, but crucially included a discourse of social citizenship enabled by expectations for employment creation, redistribution and decommodification of social provisions. Labor's social citizenship discourse was largely translated into the massive electoral support that the government of the African National Congress (ANC) has enjoyed since 1994. Conservative macroeconomic policies, and the deepening crisis of stable employment that have characterized the South African transition radically challenge, however, wage labor as an effective vehicle of social inclusion and the repository of collective identities and solidarity. The downgraded material conditions and the growing commodification of everyday life that confront a widening share of the black working class question the links between citizenship and wage labor emerged in past struggles. At the same time, the ANC government's social policies have turned the celebration of waged employment into a set of moral and pedagogical imperatives that prioritize labor market participation and the individual responsibility of the poor as alternatives to redistributive interventions regarded as conducive to welfare ‘dependency’. The article analyzes the shifting position of waged employment in relation to access to social services and social citizenship discourse in two specific cases: manufacturing workers in the East Rand region and employees of the Greater Johannesburg municipality.

The article discusses the opposition by the South African Municipal Workers' Union (SAMWU) to the privatization of Johannesburg's municipal services under Apartheid and in the new democratic dispensation. The unionization of South African black municipal workers has been shaped by a tradition of “social-movement unionism,” which greatly contributed to the decline and fall of the racist regime. The post-1994 democratic government has adopted policies of privatization of local services and utilities, which SAMWU opposed in Johannesburg by resurrecting a social movement unionism discourse. Conditions of political democracy have, however, proven detrimental to such a strategy, whose continued validity is here questioned.

Black working class opposition to the South African apartheid regime led to new forms of spatial imagery that reconfigured the country's urban areas as a terrain of worker solidarity and, as emphasized by "social movement unionism" literature, of alliances between trade union struggles and communities' insurgency. Underpinning the urban geography of South African labor was a discourse of citizenship premised on dignified waged employment and the demand for decommodified social rights. Worker-community solidarity ultimately challenged not only the apartheid state but also the spatial segregation of citizenship rights along the rural-urban divide. The scenario that followed the adoption of free-market macroecononomic policies and labor market flexibility by the post-apartheid ANC government has profoundly questioned the working class urban imagery emerged in previous decades. Moreover, post-apartheid policy changes emphasize the importance of the urban space as a terrain of contestation over social citizenship rights, access to services and working class livelihoods. In particular, the restructuring of municipal services has contributed to recommodify the access to basic provisions like water, electricity and housing. Furthermore, dynamics of industrial restructuring have facilitated retrenchments and casualization of work, which have reshaped industrial areas and negatively affected alternative urban geographies defined by worker solidarity and mobilization. Based on the author's doctoral research, this paper analyzes the impact of changing forms of production and access to services on the spatial dynamics, living conditions and strategies of two working class communities in the Gauteng province: municipal employees in Johannesburg and East Rand manufacturing workers.

In 1999 the South African government passed the Municipal Structures Act which established the Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Council and merged the East Rand towns of Alberton, Germiston, Brakpan, Benoni, Kempton Park, Springs, and Nigel under a common municipal authority. The new demarcation created a unified administrative structure for this region of approximately 2.5 million people living east of Johannesburg. It gave formal expression to long-standing processes of socioeconomic development that have defined the East Rand as a highly specific geographical entity. Between the 1950s and the 1970s the East Rand mapped itself on to South Africa's economic terrain as its industrial “workshop”, as manufacturing replaced mining as the major contributor to GDP. The administrative unification of the East Rand has taken place, however, at a moment when established patterns of economic and social integration based on manufacturing are undermined by the impact of restructuring encouraged by domestic and global forces.

Cet article discute de la transformation de l’economie et de la societe sud-africaine en relation avec l’insertion du pays dans l’Empire. La specificite sud-africaine est largement due au role central joue par le proletariat d’usine dans l’effondrement de l’apartheid. Le neoliberalisme et l’entree dans l’Empire doivent etre compris dans ce cas comme des reponses de l’etat a une composition de classe qui s’est organisee sur le lieu de travail pour resister a l’imposition de la discipline salariale. La reformulation du discours nationaliste par l’ANC pour se plier aux exigences de la mondialisation capitaliste et l’adoption d’un agenda neoliberal ont entraine l’abdication de la souverainete de l’etat comme vehicule du controle par la citoyennete sociale. De nouveaux mouvements composes pour l’essentiel des exclus du travail salarie ont emerge pour contester les choix de l’ANC. Ces mouvements n’ont pas de programme souverainiste et ne veulent pas deleguer la resistance a l’etat. Dans leur ecart aux mythologies nationaliste et salariale, ils rendent claire la nature biopolitique des courants de contestation actuels et combinent les luttes a la base avec les capacites cognitives de reappropriation.

The article discusses the redefinition of strategies of international solidarity and action in South African organised labour, with particular regard to the South African Municipal Workers' Union (SAMWU). SAMWU has recently been challenged by the pervasive penetration of global capital and multinational corporations in schemes of “PublicAPrivate partnership” in the delivery of municipal infrastructures. These developments carry potential dangers for trade union organisation and for public services in a context of extreme inequality. SAMWU has identified international action against global capitalism as a decisive terrain of struggle for workers' and citizens' rights. However, the union's difficulties in articulating an effective confrontation at this level reflects broader problems in internationalist approaches adopted by South African labour. These refer primarily to a problematic conceptualisation of new subjects of opposition and of alliances with emerging global social movements.

(1998). Restructuring, Flexibility, and the Politics of Workplace Subjectivity: A Worker Inquiry in the South African Car Industry. Rethinking Marxism: Vol. 10, No. 4, pp. 105-133.

The labor movement was one of the main actors in popular resistance to apartheid in South Africa. A militant working class, radicalized by a deeply entrenched socialist discourse and organized through practices stressing grassroots self-organization decisively shaped the transition to democracy. In post-apartheid South Africa organized labor faces a new set of challenges. The contest over labor's role in the economic reconstruction and the challenges of a tripartite industrial relations system are confronting trade unions with a new dilemma. They have to remain responsive to grassroots militancy while, at the same time, channeling it in a development effort that emphasizes social pacts and non-adversarialism. This paper analyzes these issues, emphasizing the social processes of the construction of militancy at the workplace as crucial to the analysis of unions in transition.

The strikes that have recently brought more than one million teachers and public employees into the streets in South Africa—culminating in a one-day strike on August 25, in which six hundred thousand public workers downed tools nationwide—have been brewing for the past few months. This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website , where most recent articles are published in full. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.