This special issue on precarious labor in global perspective includes analyses of precarious work in South Africa, Mexico, the United States, China and India. The key strengths of the contributions to this issue are that they demonstrate precarious workers’ capacity for collective action, the hidden forms of work that are not tracked by states, long-term historical continuities of precarious work, and differences between precarious work in the Global North and South. This introduction explores the challenges of conceptualizing precarious work; the history of precarious labor; its variations in the Global North and South; possible differences across sectors of precarious work; and the intersections between precarious work and categories of gender, race, and citizenship status. We conclude with a summary of the articles included in the issue.

This paper addresses an important but often neglected theme in debates on globalisation-the consequences for workers of engagement in global markets, particularly for those workers who are retrenched in the process. Using the South African textiles industry as a case study, the paper investigates the impact on workers' household livelihoods of industrial restructuring following trade liberalisation in the 1990s. Interviews with textile workers and retrenched textile workers were conducted in five locations in three provinces-the Western Cape, the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal-in order to capture different local dynamics. Workers employed in textiles generally enjoy a relatively stable formal sector wage, which, though less than the manufacturing average, is well above the national poverty line. However, the benefits were not evenly spread between the regions and job insecurity has been increasing. Workers retrenched from textile employment have faced extreme difficulties in a country with exceptionally high levels of open unemployment, and many families have fallen into deep poverty, which may now be transmitted intergenerationally. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Journal of Southern African StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:

No abstract

Data gathering and information processing have evolved to where it is almost unfathomable how much exists in digital form today. The generation thereof also no longer involves an explicit instruction from human to machine but can happen in real-time without human intervention. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cognitive computing are being utilized to mine data from a variety of sources. One such (profitable) source is human beings. Digital algorithms are designed to harness the power of technology to gather information. There has always been a sense of secrecy regarding some information (classified, top secret, confidential, etc.) but the Fourth Industrial Revolution has created the means to gather extremely large amounts of data, unknown to its sources. Anthropological value systems should become a fundamental foundation of digital algorithms. Such an approach could prevent software from exploiting its sources, especially minorities. Value systems together with ethics are guided by people's culture. In ethically aligned algorithm design, value systems and digital technologies intersect and govern how algorithms are developed, the way data is engaged, and further the discipline of digital humanities.