“These aren’t the jobs we want”: youth unemployment and anti-work politics in Khayelitsha, Cape Town

ABSTRACT

Research on youth unemployment in South Africa has largely been dominated by quantitative accounts that highlight skills’ mismatches, educational levels and industrial transformations. Missing from these is a sense of how youth navigate labour markets and why they might choose to abandon the job search. Based on qualitative interviews with youth from an urban township, this article examines the obstacles they face searching for stable employment and their experiences of the labour market itself. It calls attention to two significant, and largely unexplored, issues affecting young people’s relationship to labour markets. First is the role of place-based identities and the stigmatisation associated with representations of place. Second is how low-wage, insecure work acts as a disincentive for remaining in the labour market. For many young people, wage work is rarely experienced as dignified or fulfiling, nor does it provide the resources required for transitions to adulthood. Building on Kathi Weeks’s concept of “anti-work politics,” it proposes improvements to the quality of existing work and the need to expand social protections to young people. It contributes to a broader geographical literature on labour market segmentation, by highlighting how cultural representations of place affect young people’s employment prospects and work identities.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth; work; race; South Africa; unemployment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For comparison, a monthly Child Support Grant, at the time of research, was R350 per month.

2. Skollie roughly translates as thief, although this doesn’t quite capture the particularities of the word. In Cape Town in particular, the skollie is associated with the violent gangsterism of the Cape Flats and threats to white social order. The social category of the skollie was formed during the apartheid era and, as Jensen (2008) notes, is associated with criminality, and, for some gang members, acts as a marker of group identity.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christopher Webb

Christopher Webb is a postdoctoral research fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He holds a PhD in Human Geography from the University of Toronto. His research interests include youth and work, financialisation and social protection policy, and histories of anti-colonial solidarity.