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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.

Abstract: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.

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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.