There are several significant contributions in researching the South African transition, its contradictions and the playing out of contestation for interests.
Works by Barchiesi (2011) and Mosoetsa (2011) are significant because they emanate from a conceptual framework of work and labour studies. Their work also follows on the work of Hart (2002, 2005a, 2005b) as well as Webster, et al (2008) who look at the contradictions of globalisation, with increasing ability and capacity of capital to relocate and accumulate globally, yet increasing localisation of the crisis of reproduction of the working poor and unemployed. Hart (2002, 2005a, 2005b) goes further to look at the articulation of global neo-liberalism as a feature of accumulation by dispossession; in South Africa exemplified by neo- liberal policies post 1996, privatisation of basic services and punitive cost- recovery measures imposed on the poor. They also look at alternatives and responses from below to global capitalism, retrenchments, unemployment and increasing vulnerability of household survival. Theoretically these works use
Polanyi‘s ‗double movement‘ to unpack responses to global capitalism (Polanyi, 2001 [1957]). These responses range from progressive local struggles like rent boycotts in Madadeni, Anti-privatisation movements in Soweto, Abahlali Basemjondolo in Durban, intense strikes and innovative engagement of trade unions in Changwon and Orange, to conservative reactions and political mobilisation like xenophobia (and xenophobic attacks of 2008) in South Africa, the rise of the right-wing and anti-Asian-immigrants party in Orange, re-invention of patriarchy, abuse and violence in many poor households.
Mosoetsa (2011) writes about the dynamics and struggles for survival in poor households in post-apartheid South Africa. Through an ethnographic study of two townships in KwaZulu-Natal she examines the complex sets of dynamics and struggles poor households engage with for survival due to high unemployment (due to the collapse of clothing and textile industries) and the negative impact of neo-liberal policies in government and poor (and cost-recovery based) service delivery in communities. She follows the lives of women and their households, who at the height of their lives were employed in the booming clothing and textile factories, who now have to face the harshness of unemployment (both women and their husbands) in Mpumalanga, in Hammarsdale and Enhlalakahle, in Greytown.
There are several critical points Mosoetsa makes in her book. First, her research shows a continued centrality and dependence of household livelihoods on wage income. Due to the collapse in sectors of employment in the two towns, household resources are overstretched, and as a result households have to manage livelihoods with much less resources, mostly resulting in having to restructure and reduce their consumption patterns. Secondly, she highlights the role of elderly women as pillars of support and livelihoods for many households. Many households depend on the OAP of elderly women, on day/ casual work as well as self-help incomes from elderly women for survival. Many elderly women also decry the prevalence of youth unemployment and the inability of their adult children to secure employment. Thirdly, she highlights the crisis in social reproduction in households – dynamic household relations with little and more competition and conflict over access, use and control over resources. Some of these dynamics play out in households as conflict and competition between the
retrenched husband and the wife (who is now the household breadwinner) over decision making (mostly over priorities and determinations of access and use of scarce resources), to conflicts between elderly women and their adult daughters over the use of CSG for cosmetics and cell phones instead of products for children, and conflicts between elderly women and their adult sons over their failure to contribute their income towards household needs and their failure to make any household contribution. She found that the crisis of retrenchment and vulnerability among men plays out in men re-invoking traditionalist notions of patriarchy, often resulting in physical abuse. She also argues that this precariousness configures the constitution of household, family, with many households and families becoming sites of fragile stability. Mosoetsa‘s work highlights a similar point made by Fakier and Cock (2009), who did a study of Emnambithi in Ladysmith. They argue that the township is a site of the crisis of social reproduction, characterised by increasing female migrancy, restructuring of work, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, rising food prices and paucity of basic social services in communities.
Barchiesi (2011) writes a very intriguing and thought provoking book about the relationship between wage labour and social citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa. He discusses the ways in which workers‘ experiences of wage labour as a vehicle for social advancement, social emancipation and means of access to citizenship have changed and how these changes relate to government policy discourse on social citizenship (2011: xviii). In researching this change Barchiesi uses the concept of precariousness to capture black workers‘ experiences and feelings, not just in terms of perceived insecurity, but as manifestations of a discursive and significant gap between the mythology of an association of work with citizenship and what he calls hollow rhetoric in relation to workers experiencing labour market participation which is unfavourable to basic everyday survival, let alone human dignity. He critiques post-apartheid government‘s public discourse of associating employment with social citizenship and a discourse that assumes that employment56 is a panacea to problems of poverty and the
56 He makes a specific critique throughout the book of Seekings and Nattrass (2003) for simplistically assuming that any form of employment is the solution to addressing poverty and inequality in South Africa.
precariousness of the working class poor. Barchiesi asks, ‗does wage employment fulfil the promise of social emancipation in post-apartheid South Africa?‘ He also asks, ‗how has this promise been reconfigured in workers‘ experiences and narratives of the employment crisis?‘ In his response he asserts that the post- apartheid crisis of wage employment among the African majority cannot be reduced to rising joblessness and exclusion from labour market, but it has to do with deepening insecurity, vulnerability and poverty within formal employment.
The key argument of Barchiesi (2011) revolves around the fact that while millions of black South African workers struggled against apartheid to redeem employment and production from a history of abuse, insecurity, and racial despotism; almost two decades later, the prospects of a dignified life of wage- earning work remain unattainable for most South Africans. He documents and interrogates this important dilemma in the country‘s democratic transition; how economic participation has gained centrality in the government‘s definition of virtuous citizenship, and yet for most workers, employment remains an elusive and insecure experience. In the context of market liberalization and persistent social and racial inequalities, as jobs in South Africa become increasingly flexible, fragmented, and unprotected, they depart from the promise of work with dignity and citizenship rights that once inspired the struggle for freedom. He traces how the employment crisis and the responses of workers to it challenge the state‘s normative imagination of work, and raise decisive questions for the social foundations and prospects of South Africa‘s democratic experiment.