Franco Barchiesi

South African Debates on the Basic Income Grant: Wage Labour and the Post-Apartheid Social Policy*

The 2002 report of the Taylor Committee of Inquiry into a Comprehensive Social Security System for South Africa recommended widespread social policy changes. A key suggestion in the report was the phased introduction of a Basic Income Grant (BIG) on a universal, non-means tested basis. In this way, the report addressed widespread demands by labour and civil society organisations for a form of income to be provided independently from individual employment conditions. The BIG concept recognises that existing social security programmes are related to stable waged employment and therefore exclude increasing numbers of long-term unemployed and contingent workers. This article argues that current shifts in the countrys policy discourse question earlier social policies, which saw social inclusion as primarily depending on labour market participation. At the same time, however, the extremely cautious approach to the BIG contained in the Taylor report reflects a government approach that continuously praises work ethics and wage labour discipline while stigmatising welfare ‘dependency’.

Wage Labor and Social Citizenship in the Making of Post-Apartheid South Africa

The scholarly literature on the South African democratic transition generally recognizes the decisive role of organized labor and black trade union organizations in the collapse of the apartheid regime. Labors contribution in this regard was premised on a view of liberation that was not limited to the achievement of political rights and civil liberties, but crucially included a discourse of social citizenship enabled by expectations for employment creation, redistribution and decommodification of social provisions. Labors social citizenship discourse was largely translated into the massive electoral support that the government of the African National Congress (ANC) has enjoyed since 1994. Conservative macroeconomic policies, and the deepening crisis of stable employment that have characterized the South African transition radically challenge, however, wage labor as an effective vehicle of social inclusion and the repository of collective identities and solidarity. The downgraded material conditions and the growing commodification of everyday life that confront a widening share of the black working class question the links between citizenship and wage labor emerged in past struggles. At the same time, the ANC governments social policies have turned the celebration of waged employment into a set of moral and pedagogical imperatives that prioritize labor market participation and the individual responsibility of the poor as alternatives to redistributive interventions regarded as conducive to welfare ‘dependency’. The article analyzes the shifting position of waged employment in relation to access to social services and social citizenship discourse in two specific cases: manufacturing workers in the East Rand region and employees of the Greater Johannesburg municipality.

The Violence of Work: Revisiting South Africa’s ‘Labour Question’ Through Precarity and Anti-Blackness

A normative association of waged work with ideas of dignity and personal responsibility was central to the elaboration of the ‘labour question’ by the institutions of white rule in early 20th-century South Africa. Colonial work ethic sustained representations of the ‘native’ as a productive agent for whom promises of progress and modernisation (deriving from economic interdependence) contrasted with the deepening of political subjugation and racialised despotism. The respectability that was putatively linked to working for wages served to define the ‘native’ in opposition to what the white state perceived as a more threatening blackness, averse to wage labour and incompatible with the country’s colonial situation. Nascent African nationalism articulated its claims (albeit with significant ambiguities), against the background of such ideational oppositions. Ideals of productive Africans as virtuous subjects of the white-ruled polity simultaneously disguised and underpinned modalities of structural violence. These consisted in the institutional and coercive definition of wage labour as a quintessentially precarious experience for black workers. Conceptions of native work ethic became the stake in political conflicts. They cast blackness as an antagonistic other, often associated with images of indolence and work avoidance, the silencing of which has been a recurring theme in 20th-century South African politics.

South Africa in Transition: Scenarios Facing Organized Labor

The labor movement was one of the main actors in popular resistance to apartheid in South Africa. A militant working class, radicalized by a deeply entrenched socialist discourse and organized through practices stressing grassroots self-organization decisively shaped the transition to democracy. In post-apartheid South Africa organized labor faces a new set of challenges. The contest over labors role in the economic reconstruction and the challenges of a tripartite industrial relations system are confronting trade unions with a new dilemma. They have to remain responsive to grassroots militancy while, at the same time, channeling it in a development effort that emphasizes social pacts and non-adversarialism. This paper analyzes these issues, emphasizing the social processes of the construction of militancy at the workplace as crucial to the analysis of unions in transition.

Work in the Constitution of the Human: Twentieth-Century South African Entanglements of Welfare, Blackness, and Political Economy

Amid the shock that followed the massacre at the Lonmin Marikana platinum mine, on August 16, 2012, when the South African police killed thirtyfour striking black miners and wounded approximately eighty others, a team of sociologists from the University of Johannesburg produced an “instant book” detailing the events, based on the oral narratives of survivors (see Alexander et al. 2012). The interviews make for somber reading. One respondent reckoned: “We were killed for nothing . . . we were not fighting with management. We simply wanted to know when they were going to give us our money” (108). Others read the lethality of the event through the persistent racial predicament of the South African workplace: “The white people pay each other better, but we get nothing” (110). The conspicuous presence of white law enforcement commanding officers that day is also frequently remarked upon. There is some general agreement that the strike concerned demands for adequate wages to meet the most basic needs and for workers’ voices to be heard by management without the mediation of discredited and unrepresentative unions. South Atlantic Quarterly

‘Schooling bodies to hard work’: the South African state’s policy discourse and its moral constructions of welfare

ABSTRACT This article offers an investigation of social policy discourse with specific regard to the ways in which interventions aimed at addressing poverty and social inequality have conceptualised welfare, social assistance and social security. It argues that the post-1994 African National Congress (ANC)-led government has placed a priority on waged employment and labour market participation as the preferred route to social inclusion and social security, to the detriment of universal redistributive programmes not associated with paid work. The state’s promotion of a form of social disciplining centred on wage labour has clashed with the material reality of spiralling unemployment and the proliferation of precarious and unprotected occupations. This disjuncture raises important questions concerning the capacity of the new institutional dispensation to govern South Africa’s long transition – or even the ability of the ANC to justify their policy decisions to their core constituency.

The Public Sector Strikes in South Africa: A Trial of Strength

The strikes that have recently brought more than one million teachers and public employees into the streets in South Africa—culminating in a one-day strike on August 25, in which six hundred thousand public workers downed tools nationwide—have been brewing for the past few months. This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website , where most recent articles are published in full. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Book review symposium: Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries

Amid the devastation wrought over the past five years by the current global capitalist crisis, debates accompanying harsh austerity policies have tended to enact few variations of one basic script: ‘jobs’ are the salvation from collapse, corporate ‘job creators’ its avengers. Unprecedented pain is thus being visited, in the name of job creation, upon those that, over the past four neoliberal decades, have already suffered the injuries of economic liberalization. Politicians from the right and the left alike have consistently used the imperative of creating jobs to legitimize deepening inequalities, the constant erosion of labour and environmental standards, corporate tax cuts, the dismantling of public services and redistributive policies, the deepening insecurity of lives forced to depend on labour markets that offer little of the rewards and dignity they promise. Kathi Weeks’s The Problem with Work is thus uniquely timely for those who want to confront the narrowing of options and the stifling of imagination currently underway in mainstream discussions on how jobs shape a precarious world. The book’s main strength is its critical appraisal of employment not merely as an object of sociological analysis and therapeutics. The crisis of work is not here primarily about employees’ security, motivation and satisfaction, or the challenge of rebalancing the requirements of jobs, families and social provisions. It cannot be fixed by social engineering and productionrelated policy interventions. It rather speaks to the collapse of norms – evoking citizenship, freedom, empowerment and socialization – that have made work a master signifier of social existence in an age in which, as Weeks argues following André Gorz, actual jobs have ceased to underwrite any of those values. It is thus time, Weeks continues, to replace sociology with political theory as the key to unlock the implications of work with power relations, imaginative projects, social processes that produce governable subjects but also liberate subversive desires of liberation from, as much as of, labour. If the problem, then, is life’s subordination to work, it comprehensively affects the stable and precariously employed as well as the unemployed while fusing realms conventionally separated as ‘production’ and ‘reproduction’. Rather than the 526346WES0010.1177/0950017014526346Work, employment and societyBook review symposium research-article2014

Book review symposium

Amid the devastation wrought over the past five years by the current global capitalist crisis, debates accompanying harsh austerity policies have tended to enact few variations of one basic script: ‘jobs’ are the salvation from collapse, corporate ‘job creators’ its avengers. Unprecedented pain is thus being visited, in the name of job creation, upon those that, over the past four neoliberal decades, have already suffered the injuries of economic liberalization. Politicians from the right and the left alike have consistently used the imperative of creating jobs to legitimize deepening inequalities, the constant erosion of labour and environmental standards, corporate tax cuts, the dismantling of public services and redistributive policies, the deepening insecurity of lives forced to depend on labour markets that offer little of the rewards and dignity they promise. Kathi Weeks’s The Problem with Work is thus uniquely timely for those who want to confront the narrowing of options and the stifling of imagination currently underway in mainstream discussions on how jobs shape a precarious world. The book’s main strength is its critical appraisal of employment not merely as an object of sociological analysis and therapeutics. The crisis of work is not here primarily about employees’ security, motivation and satisfaction, or the challenge of rebalancing the requirements of jobs, families and social provisions. It cannot be fixed by social engineering and productionrelated policy interventions. It rather speaks to the collapse of norms – evoking citizenship, freedom, empowerment and socialization – that have made work a master signifier of social existence in an age in which, as Weeks argues following André Gorz, actual jobs have ceased to underwrite any of those values. It is thus time, Weeks continues, to replace sociology with political theory as the key to unlock the implications of work with power relations, imaginative projects, social processes that produce governable subjects but also liberate subversive desires of liberation from, as much as of, labour. If the problem, then, is life’s subordination to work, it comprehensively affects the stable and precariously employed as well as the unemployed while fusing realms conventionally separated as ‘production’ and ‘reproduction’. Rather than the 526346WES0010.1177/0950017014526346Work, employment and societyBook review symposium research-article2014