Bridget Kenny

Selling selves: East Rand retail sector workers fragmented and reconfigured

This article examines the changing labour market and labour process in South African food retailing. It shows that black workers replaced white women in front-line jobs in the 1970s, changed the workplace order, and unified workers around a common collective race and class identity. The article argues, however, that militant and unified East Rand black shop workers became fragmented and marginalised by the late 1990s. The growth of casualisation and subcontracting helps to explain shifting political subjectivities of how these processes became embedded in broader social meanings constituting service work.

Servicing Modernity: White Women Shop Workers on the Rand and Changing Gendered Respectabilities, 1940s–1970s1

In the late 1960s and early 1970s the National Party raised the problem of black workers entering shop and clerical work. It argued for the introduction of job reservation in the sector because of the alleged threat of the personal interaction between black service workers and white customers, as well as white women shop assistants. In a broader context that discouraged married white women from working, the National Party instead deemed white women service workers a category worth protecting. Through decades of employment in the sector, working white women and their union, the National Union of Distributive Workers (NUDW), had defended the legitimacy and respectability of these women workers. Male politicians’ concern to protect these white women (Hyslop 1995; Keegan 2001) as workers more significantly was based on a desire to sustain the retail experience of a white public. To the National Party, gracious and feminine care bolstered white consumer bliss and the racial and class order underpinning it.

Introduction: Precarity in Store

This chapter sets out the context of precarious retail work from the 1990s to the present with Wal-Mart’s entry into the market in South Africa. Working conditions in South African retail have remained poor, but South African retail workers continue to make collective demands at the site of work. This chapter puts forth the argument of the book that a longer history, detailing retail worker politics over nearly a century, explains the endurance of workers’ collective politics today. It outlines three intersecting contours to explain shifting conjunctures of retail worker politics in South Africa: retail as a site of nation and belonging; the law and its role in structuring political subjects; and articulations of race, class, and gender in the constitution of abasebenzi (isiZulu for workers).

“Tools Down, Everybody Out to the Canteen!”: Wildcats and Go-Slows, Political Subjects Reconfigured

This chapter looks at worker actions occurring in these shops in the 1990s and 2000s, including wildcat strikes and go-slows. It traces how workers in different employment categories both reaffirmed the collective political subject abasebenzi and reproduced divisions. Workers protested by claiming belonging, skill and class in workplace relations. In the process of embarking on collective actions, they further localized their politics to branches.

Regulating Retail: The Category “Employee” and Its Divisions

This chapter examines the socio-legal history of the category of “employee” in the retail sector. It describes the connection between the categories of employee and that of servant/native/labourer in law. It then traces the shifting uses of casual, part-time, and contract labour, key employment categories defining the retail sector through its history from the 1930s to the post-apartheid period. The chapter shows how workers’ claims to labour rights developed in relation to legal categories with affective histories. It tracks how the full-time, permanent worker became the ideal category. Gendered and racialized legal categories conditioned the collective political subject emerging in workers’ struggles.

Rupturing Relations: Abasebenzi as Collective Political Subject

This chapter examines the experiences of black workers’ entry into retail service jobs in and around Johannesburg from the late 1960s to the 1980s. Black women were discriminated against in shops in a number of ways, which marked their difference in status and skill from white women. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, they organized and contested their marginalization, defining abasebenzi (isiZulu for workers) as a militant political subject, in contrast to white women. Workers organized through CCAWUSA. This race-class subject was a potent signifier, a particular response both to an already constituted labour process and to a realm of consumption defined through white women’s labour.

“To Sit at Home and Do Nothing”: Gender and the Constitutive Meaning of Work

This chapter examines the discursive symbolism of the ubiquitous phrase “to sit at home and do nothing,” in order to interrogate how spaces outside of the workplace helped define the meaning of work for retail workers. Workers’ stories of household precariousness and the “praxis of providing,” expressed through gendered anxieties and futurity in children, help to explain the endurance of a politics focused on workplace relations.

Consuming Politics: Wal-Mart, the New Terrain of Belonging and the Endurance of Abasebenzi

This chapter examines the US multinational Wal-Mart’s acquisition of South African listed Massmart Holdings. Wal-Mart, the world’s largest private employer, is well known for wage theft, work intensification, eroded benefits, and anti-union practices. This chapter examines the current conjuncture of retailing in South Africa, with globalization of retail capital, supply chain management, corporate consolidation, and expansion into new working-class markets. The chapter explores how nation is now modelled in the market and through consumption and juxtaposes this to the low-wage service worker, employed through labour brokers and as general workers. It concludes by examining the reproduction of retail worker politics redefining abasebenzi, race, and skill in a fraying relationship of labour to nation.

Signifying Belonging: Restructuring and Workplace Relations

This chapter details the expansion of retail capital through the format of the “hypers” in the 1970s and the 1980s on the Rand, as sign of modern living and national progress. In the 1990s, these arenas underwent restructuring as retail capital concentrated and consolidated domestically. Under democracy, workers confronted what they perceived to be a betrayal of built-up relations, which they had enacted to effect a participatory realm. They narrated experiences of loss and objectification in the face of neoliberal corporate culture. These formulations suggest how these workplaces continued to be terrains of relation.

Servicing a Nation: White Women Shop Assistants and the Fantasy of Belonging

In this chapter, the constitution of the retail sector in and around Johannesburg through the labour of white women from the 1930s to the 1970s in service to a “white public” is examined. A gendered and racialized notion of service became central to directing expanding consumption under apartheid. Working-class white women organized into their union to contest poor conditions in stores, but a class identity became harder for them to maintain under apartheid. Their experiences were individualized, and they reproduced social hierarchies within shops while securing these spaces of consumption for their customers.