In 2005, Ruth Ngobeni and a determined group of contract cashiers and bag packers gathered together after their Sunday shift in the alcove of the ATM outside a Hyperama supermarket where they worked. They were employed by a temporary employment agency, not the retailer, but most had worked in the shop for many years, and many had previously worked directly for the retailer. Leaving packages with household purchases against the wall, they filed into the alcove, sat on the floor on pieces of cardboard or leaned against the windows. Around their shoulders, the afternoon sun peered into the nook. A security guard wandered in wanting to know what the meeting was about. Balancing her hips on a narrow window ledge, one woman looked over to him, paused, stood up firmly and laughed, saying that the workers (abasebenzi in isiZu lu) were meeting and that he should not disturb them. About 25 black workers, mostly women in their 30s from surrounding townships, met to decide on a course of action to contest erratic variances in their payday schedules .1 Labour legislation regulated these, and workers had requested that a Department of Labour inspector come to the shop to assist them. The inspector had visited, but had spoken only to permanent workers who were employed directly by the retailer, and not to the contract workers themselves. On that sunny afternoon in greater Johannesburg , Ruth and her colleagues redoubled their determination to seek an audience with the inspectorate.2
Nearly a decade later, in 2013, another contract cashier at a subsidiary of Massmart , a South African company acquired by the international retailer Wal-Mart in 2011, described how her manager required a group of workers to stay at work until midnight because the tills were not balancing. Ninah Ndlovu had been at work since 7 a.m. and her shift ended at 4 p.m. The company used a new till point technology that was often incorrect, according to workers, but that could only be reconciled after a few days. Regardless, managers kept workers late that night . Ninah remembered: âI left a child [at home]. I even had to sleep at the police station because I couldnât get home .â3 She said that the company offered them R8 for transport as compensation, barely enough for commuters to get anywhere, let alone home across Johannesburg, late at night with only limited and dubious transport options. Worse still, they were not paid an overtime rate or a night allowance, as South African labour law would legislate. Going as a group after this event, the affected contract workers demanded that the retail management listen to their complaints. These women service workers said, âthe situation at [the store] makes us angry every day.â A shop steward said, â[Y]ou need to stand up for yourself and speak out if you are wronged. If they [managers] do not listen, mobilize your fellow workers, the workers [abasebenzi], and take up the issue.â4
The image of precarious wage work is a familiar one in South Africa. Around the world, as well, retail jobs are often described as low wage with precarious working conditions ; so, too, are they often filled by women (Coulter 2014; Luce 2013; Grugulis and Bozkurt 2011; Lichtenstein 2006; Chan 2011). We meet Ninah at the tills in a South African store now owned by Wal-Mart, but it was not Wal-Martâs recent entry into South Africa that introduced the sector to practices of poor wages and insecure conditions. From the late 1990s until the present, working conditions in South African retail have remained bleak. Workersâ grievances around pay schedules, underpayment of wages, and working time highlight their roles as household providers and earners. Yet these South African retail workers continue to make collective demands at the site where their precariousness is most acutely inscribed.
Both Ruth and Ninah narrate resolute and collective responses to such persistent grievances in stores, invoking the emotive sign âworkersâ â abasebenzi. Examining one of todayâs most prevalent and ubiquitous categories of precarious employment â retail work â I explore why it is that a primarily black, female, low-wage, and low-skill service workforce has, in fact, returned over and over to the workplace as a crucial site of politics. In order to explain why and how retail worker politics carries on, this book tracks the changes in social relations and semiotic meanings that configured the collective political subjec t âworkersâ in retail since the 1930s.
South African retail workersâ ongoing labour politics are constituted out of a longer history in which the collective political subject abasebenzi came to signify contestation over forms of political relation. Retail worker politics endured (in changing form) because of three interrelated dynamics: retail spaces are sites of nation and belonging; labour law revised and redrew boundaries reinscribing the subject âemployee â in relation to forms of employment in the sector; and workers reformed the gendered, raced, classed political subject of abasebenzi within these âsocial sites â (Hall 1985, 99). Precisely because labour and blackness are bound so tightly into one another ideologically and materially in South Africa, precarious wage labour and worker politics became such a tense site of affective return, an enduring place of antagonism, at different moments. This book tracks a history of nearly a century of the reproduction of and changes to South African retail worker politics, to argue for the continued salience of labour politics today.
I briefly consider how precarious worker politics is often explained through presentist accounts of economic interest, strategic leverage, or trade union strength. Instead, I insist on a conjunctural analysis (Hart 2016, 3) in which the histories of relations and meanings bear on the reproduction of concrete âsubjects-in-struggle â (Hall 1985, 112) discussed in the remaining sections.
âTwo for the Price of Oneâ: The Inadequacies of Instrumentalism
In the context of economic insecurities and the continuing devaluation of labour under late capitalism, arguments from different quarters suggest that Ruth and Ninahâs workplace politics is anachronistic. First, economic restructuring and changes to work have led to an overall decline in reliability of the steady job (Standing 2011). Worldwide, various forms of part-time, casual, and contract employment have increased. Generally speaking, many forms of ânon-standard â employment relegate workers to precarious labour market positions, with low wages, insecurity, minimal benefits, and reduced collective voice creating real difficulties for mobilizing in these sites (Stanford and Vosko 2004; Standing 1999; Kalleberg 2013; Vosko et al. 2009; Felstead and Jewson 1999).
So, too, for South Africa, as working conditions have declined for many workers, including what has been prominently documented as fragmentation through casualization and externalization of employment (Standing et al. 1996; Kenny and Webster 1998; Clarke 2004; Theron 2005; Webster et al. 2008; Barchiesi 2011).5 Combined with increasing unemployment and household precariousness, a âcrisisâ of survival has come to characterize work for many under neoliberalism in South Africa (Fakier and Cock 2009; Bezuidenhout and Fakier 2006; Mosoetsa 2011; Benya 2015).
Furthermore, in the global South , wage labour itself provides income to fewer people (Breman and van der Linden 2014; Breman 2010; Lindell 2010). Precariousness runs deep; it is a symptom of the inability of economies to absorb labour at all, of the growing surplus population relegated to a âwageless lifeâ (Denning 2010; see also McIntyre and Nast 2011). It is widely recogni...