From the shop floor to the kitchen table: the shifting centre of precarious workers’ politics in South Africa

Abstract

This article argues that, as wage work has become more precarious, the importance of the household in the livelihood strategies of precarious South African workers has increased. The shifting importance of the household in relation to the workplace in the economic lives of workers has implications for the political strategies that these workers adopt. The article draws on data from a national household survey combined with insights from the author's fieldwork across rural and urban sites in South Africa. It contributes to the growing literature on the politics of precarious work in the global South.

[De l'atelier à la table de la cuisine : la base changeante des politiques en faveur des travailleurs précaires en Afrique du Sud.] Cet article soutient que, puisque le travail salarié devient de plus en plus précaire, l'importance du ménage dans les stratégies en matière d'amélioration des moyens de subsistance des travailleurs précaires sud-africains a augmenté. L'importance changeante du ménage en relation avec le lieu de travail dans la vie économique des travailleurs a des implications sur les stratégies politiques que ces travailleurs adoptent. Cet article se base sur des données de l'enquête nationale sur les ménages combinées, avec des idées provenant du travail de terrain de l'auteur dans des sites ruraux et urbains en Afrique du Sud. L'article contribue aux publications sur la politique du travail précaire dans le Sud, qui sont en nombre croissant.

Keywords:

• labour movements
• precarious work
• South Africa
• COSATU
• social movements
• livelihoods

Mots-clés:

• mouvements de main d'oeuvre
• travail précaire
• Afrique du Sud
• COSATU
• mouvements sociaux
• moyens d'existence

Acknowledgements

The research presented in this article was conducted while I was a PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA. I am grateful for the guidance and support I received from both faculty and students in the Department of Sociology there, especially Beverly Silver. I was offered valuable feedback on earlier versions of this article from Marcel Paret, Jackie Cock and Bridget Kenny, as well as by two anonymous reviewers.

Note on contributor

Ben Scully is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. His research focuses on labour, livelihoods, social protection and development policy, with a focus on southern Africa.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. There are a few exceptions to the BCEA requirement for UIF deduction. The most problematic group from a methodological perspective is public sector workers. There is no easy way to identify public sector workers in the NIDS data. In order to not count public sector workers who do not have UIF deducted as precarious, two additional questions were used. To be counted as precarious, a worker had to also report that they did not have deductions for a pension/provident fund nor a medical aid in addition to not having UIF deducted.

2. In the NIDS data the mean income that employed people earn from their main job (whether it is wage work or self-employment) is R3144 per month. The median income of employed respondents is R1550. Although R3100 is twice the median income, it is not sufficient to provide the security and stability normally associated with formal or ‘non-precarious' work. While R3100 makes sense conceptually as a cut-off, given it is near the mean income of employed workers, that specific number was dictated by the structure of the data. In the proxy surveys of the NIDS, self-employed income is recorded in income bands, rather than as specific numbers. R3100 is the cut-off point of one of the bands.

3. This and all other calculations in the article use the post-stratified weights provided in the NIDS data which weight the sample to the characteristics of the South African population as a whole.

4. There has been a proposal by the Treasury to eliminate the means test in 2016, making the old-age pension South Africa's first universal grant.