Drawing on two case studies of the growth of casualisation and subcontracting in South Africa, this paper shows how 'flexiwork' is being introduced at the same time as South Africa's first democratically elected government is trying to extend basic core rights and standards to large sectors of the workforce that have in the past been excluded from the core labour regulation regime. This shift by employers towards 'flexiwork', in combination with high unemployment and the legacy of a sharply racially segmented labour market under apartheid, is re-segmenting a dual labour market. An increasingly polarised labour market is emerging, consisting of a growing number of marginalised 'flexiworkers' next to a 'core' workforce of black and white workers who increasingly also feel the threat of insecurity. The use of flexible labour is partly a response to a well-organised labour movement which has won shopfloor rights over the past decade and has succeeded in getting these rights entrenched in law. Although the labour movement has committed itself to organise 'flexiworkers', it is a long way from innovative responses to the challenge of flexibility.

No 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.

Casual and contract employment increased in South African food retailing in the 1990s, opening divisions of labor on shop floors among black workers previously unified. Literature on labor mobilization concentrates on institutional strategies to organize contingent workers. Explaining new segmentation among retail workers, this paper finds that a notion of what it meant to be a "worker" is also relevant for explaining obstacles to mobilization. "Worker" legacies were shaped in the 1980s and carried forward with shifting emphases in the post-apartheid period. These processes reproduced a normative notion of worker as full-time, permanent employee and labor rights as codified in a narrowed employment relationship. Casual and contract workers experienced work as a series of exclusions from rights and respect within the workplace vis-à-vis permanent workers. Contingent workers protested their marginalization by reclaiming their inclusion within workplace relations, within a workplace citizenship. In the process, divisions of labor deepened.

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.