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ABSTRACT
In this article, I present ethnographic insights into a precarious workers’ struggle at the Heineken Sedibeng brewery nearby Johannesburg. Through oral histories of key women organisers in this struggle, this article looks at the ways neoliberal externalisation of labour shapes contemporary working lives in South Africa. I use the concepts of autonomy and belonging to interpret workers’ realities and efforts to change precarious conditions. From the workers’ experiences and women’s biographies emerge two key contestations that reveal what it means to be a precarious worker under neoliberal capitalism. The first contestation exists inside South Africa’s labour relations system that creates conditions of unbelonging and precarity for the majority of workers. At the Heineken plant, the established union sided with the employers and entrenched externalised labour arrangements. The second contestation concerns the presence of violence in social relations negotiated by women workers in all spheres of their lives. This article shows women workers’ persistent efforts to reconstitute relations and spaces of belonging on their own terms to oppose injustices in the workplace and in South African society.
Acknowledgements
The research for this paper was made possible through the Global Excellence and Stature (GES) postdoctoral fellowship awarded to me from 2017-2019 by the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. I would like to thank the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies at UJ for hosting me during this time. I appreciate the invitation to contribute to this special issue and the support from the editorial team. This work would not have been possible without the generous cooperation of the labour broker workers and the three women who shared their narratives, for which I am deeply grateful. Finally, I would like to thank my friends and two anonymous reviewers for their encouraging and constructive comments that helped me improve this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Not her real name.
2. The research ethics committee approved the research proposal.
3. Interview 3 July 2020.
4. The amended section 198 of the Labour Relations Act (LRA) came into effect in 2015. This section regulates the use of temporary employment services (TES) commonly referred to as labour brokers. It provides protections for labour broker workers, fixed-term contract workers, and part-time employees. After three months, temporary workers have the right to become (permanent) employees of the client company and should be treated equal to the employees of the client company. It provides a legal avenue for precarious workers to challenge workplace inequalities, in particular, through the demand of permanent jobs and equal payment in the workplace (Englert and Runciman Citation2019).
5. Externalisation is not the same as the process of casualisation which refers to the increasing utilisation of part-time and temporary workers and often overlaps with externalisation (Theron Citation2014: vi).
6. The CCMA is an independent dispute resolution body established in terms of the Labour Relations Act (LRA). Bargaining councils operate at the level of industries or economic sectors and are a forum for collective bargaining and dispute resolution between employers and trade unions.
7. Stats SA definition of ‘Informal employment’ identifies persons who are in precarious employment situations, irrespective of whether or not the entity for which they work is in the formal or informal sector. Persons in informal employment, therefore, comprise all persons in the informal sector, employees in the formal sector, and persons working in private households who are not entitled to basic benefits such as pension or medical aid contributions from their employer and who do not have a written contract of employment (Stats SA Citation2019).
9. Interviews 17 June 2020 and 26 June 2020.
10. The Simunye Workers Forum was established in 2015 as a forum for labour broker workers across industrial sectors to organise and discuss common issues (Englert and Runciman Citation2019, 87).
11. I accompanied an interview in June 2018 by Thomas Englert.
12. Vereeniging, 11 April 2019 arbitration hearing.
14. Group interview 18 April 2019 with Noma.
15. Telephonic interview 6 February 2021.
16. Meeting 5 August 2018.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Femke Brandt
Femke Brandt lives in Johannesburg and currently works at Beneficial Technologies (Bentec) as as researcher and trainer in social and environmental justice projects. Between 2017 and 2019, she was a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Femke is interested in the lived realities of precarious workers and women in South Africa to engage questions of power, belonging, and autonomy in neoliberal times.