Neoliberalism and casualization of public sector services: the case of waste collection services in Cape Town, South Africa

Abstract

This article is concerned with the South African state's adoption of global neoliberal ideology and how this contributes to the casualization of labor. While most research has examined labor casualization with respect to the behavior of private sector companies and firms, this article examines the behavior of the public sector. Taking the example of Cape Town's municipal government, known as the unicity, and its strategies for collecting waste in black townships, I discuss the full cost recovery principles of the municipal government and the ways in which local governments, like private sector firms, further the casualization of labor. That is, the consequence of recovering costs in part by promoting short-term contracts for labor paid at minimum wage under precarious conditions.The article focuses on the 1997±2001 period and demonstrates how government in its post-apartheid moment mobilized patriarchal gender ideologies as well as the rhetoric of voluntarism and skill acquisition to justify the cheap or unpaid labor of women as casual laborers or volunteers in waste collection. Such a conjuncture of privatization and patriarchy serves the interests of capitalism through forms of domination exploiting race and gender.The article relies on secondary information as well as on the field information gathered in Cape Town in the summers of 2001 and 2002 1 and updated by correspondence in 2003. First-hand information includes a series of open-ended and semi-structured interviews with the City officials at the unicity, with the private company operators and individuals contracted for waste removal in the informal sector townships, and with community members involved in the various waste collection schemes described here.The organization of this article is as follows. The first section provides a brief outline of the legacies of apartheid with respect to labor casualization and the stratification of the anonymous reviewers of IJURR for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article. The article's shortcomings remain the author's responsibility.1 The interviews for this project were conducted in the summer of 2001 by the author and were followed up by her student assistant, Nicole Lamers, in the summer of 2002.2 Black men who were hired as migrant laborers were required to leave their wives and children behind in homelands and be shacked with other men in overcrowded, single-room occupancies called hostels (Mamphela, 1993). Consequently, black women who were unable to earn a living in the impoverished homelands and came to the cities, sometimes with all or part of their families, to be with their husbands or to look for a source of income, were illegal and vulnerable to arrest and expulsion. Most black women found informal employment as domestic workers and, deprived of their own families, were housed with whites to care for their households. But others set up their makeshift shacks in areas adjacent to hostels and black townships and made their labor available cheaply and flexibly as a massive urban reserve la...

From Waste to Resource: The Trade in Wastes and Global Recycling Economies

“…They emphasise the casualisation of sub-contracted co-operative labour, and point to the sanitisation, and displacement and re-settlement of urban waste workers, and they highlight the deleterious effects of these changes on the livelihoods of well-established groups of waste-pickers such as Cairo's Zabaleen [104,105,106,107,108,109,110,111].…”

Efficiency measurement of basic service delivery at South African district and local municipalities

“…Against this background, there is an obvious need to assess the progress made by local government to achieve its new objectives. Some scholarly attention has already been at this important aspect of the reform process (see, for instance, Macdonald andPape, 2002 andMiraftab, 2004). However, to date there has been no work on evaluating econometrically the efficiency of local government service delivery.…”

Poverty Politics and Governance of Potable Water Services: the Core–Periphery Syntax in Metropolitan Accra, Ghana

“…From this perspective a city's governance discourse presents a litmus test for examining outcomes and spatiality of its existing services (Miraftab 2004;Samson 2009). This is particularly so when privatization of utility services remains the most preferred option for most city managers and donors (Smith 2004).…”