Maxim Bolt

Producing permanence: employment, domesticity and the flexible future on a South African border farm

Abstract What does it mean to be ‘permanent’ in an increasingly flexible world of work? On the Zimbabwean-South African border, white farmers guard against risk by investing in portfolios of estates and emphasizing their mobility. But the farms rely on core black workforces of resident ‘general workers’, known as mapermanent. The lives of mapermanent embody temporal contradictions in South African agriculture. Work regimes depend on arrangements established through long-term residence in labour compounds, a stability threatened by employers’ pragmatism in a volatile sector. Here, short-term ‘permanence’ coexists with longer-term insecurity. Moreover, what I call provisional permanence is built on others’ transience: mapermanent draw on the domestic labour of temporary contract workers and the order enforcement of rotating border garrisons. Tensions between temporalities characterize workers’ assertions of ‘permanence’, and their limitations, in an economy of flexibility and shifting investments.

Accidental Neoliberalism and the Performance of Management: Hierarchies in Export Agriculture on the Zimbabwean-South African Border

Abstract South Africa’s export farms have shifted from racialised paternalism to corporate managerialism. But how have workforce dynamics changed? This article offers an ethnographic perspective on agriculture on the transient Zimbabwean border. An ‘actor-centred’ approach examines the causes and extent of transformation. Who furthers managerial logics? Why? With what effects? White farmers emphasise impersonal, rationalised business for diverse reasons. What looks like part of a single global process of neoliberalisation is an accidental result. At the same time, foreign supermarket-funded development projects become subjected to logics of workforce paternalism. Managerialism itself has limited effect on labour arrangements. Workers’ hierarchies and cross-border networks are built on different principles from global supply chains. From within each network, it is as if the other were invisible.

Introduction: Global Economic Inclusion and African Workers

Abstract This introductory article explores the transformative potential of global connections for African workers. It challenges recent claims that African workers have become functionally irrelevant to the global economy by examining the shift of global demand for African workers from formal to increasingly informalised labour arrangements, mediated by social enterprises, labour brokers and graduate entrepreneurs. Focusing on global employment connections initiated from above and from below, we consider why global labour linkages have tended to increase rather than reduce problems of vulnerable and unstable working conditions within African countries, and consider the economic and political conditions needed for African workers to capture the gains of inclusion in the global economy.

Mediated Paternalism and Violent Incorporation: Enforcing Farm Hierarchies on the Zimbabwean–South African Border

Paternalism and violence on South African farms have been famously intertwined. In a kinship idiom, fatherly white farmers confer ‘gifts’ on black workers, their ‘people’. This discretion maintains the conditions for racialised violence. But, on the Zimbabwean–South African border, mass-migration and globalised agriculture give paternalism and violence new significance. If white extra-legal violence was previously key to maintaining racialised, hierarchical order in rural areas, today a similar order is maintained through collusion between white farmers, senior black workers, and border guards. Such distributed coercion has precedents, with white and black patriarchs enforcing their positions and agendas through physical force. Today, however, white farmers are keen to perform a corporate style and appear removed from any vigilante violence. Senior black workers actively entrench themselves as powerful arbiters of farm order amid transience and widespread unemployment, drawing on the coercive power of border guards. But as the latter mediate paternalism down the chain of command, this remains at the pleasure of their employers. It all depends on having a job. Moreover, even as everyday influence is devolved down the hierarchy, senior workers are kept in their place by an absolute distinction between black and white.

Making workers real: Regulatory spotlights and documentary stepping-stones on a South African border farm

Documents are central to the infrastructure through which formal workforces are constituted. They thus offer a privileged vantage point onto how formality is asserted and experienced as real. On the Zimbabwean–South African border, where formality is a plural and uneven patchwork of “formalizations,” thousands of migrants are employed on export-oriented commercial farms. Connections between state institutions and workplaces are regulatory spotlights. More complex than employee protection or domination, or than window-dressing fiction, they make workers by recognizing them as different from “border jumpers.” Workers make their own use of spotlights. Documents become steppingstones, as migrants broker conversions toward more durable forms of worker identity. They navigate the constellation of fixed points that documents represent, bringing coherence to fragmentary encounters. Spotlights and stepping-stones lie at the point where formal regulation and livelihood plans constitute one another, and thereby establish the shared ground for negotiating the “reality” of a wage economy.

Transcending the economic

Callebert usefully critiques a ‘dual economy’ approach to South Africa. This model, posited by scholars and politicians, casts a poor ‘second’ economy as separate and excluded from a capital-intensive, globally connected ‘first’ economy. Versions of this diagnosis imply particular solutions: either bringing the second economy into the first, or bringing people from one sector into the other by lowering wages. As Callebert shows, matters are more complicated. The employed are hardly secure. The interests of the formally employed and the ‘underclass’ are not as sharply opposed as may be imagined. Families contain people in different socio-economic positions, and the employed have to support large numbers of kin. Moreover, people and families combine strategies to make ends meet, straddling the supposed formal/informal divide. And formal jobs offer resources and opportunities for informal business. Callebert contends that all this complexity – evident in South Africa’s past and present –was masked by an exceptionalist, teleological narrative of proletarianization. Foregrounding the interdependences within a single economy reveals the limitations of lowering wages to employ more people (since wages support other kin). And doing so enables proper historicization of the connections between livelihood strategies. Callebert’s point is well made. His critique of calls to expand the ranks of the working poor is convincing. Here, I engage not so much with his overall point as with his underlying conceptual framework. The article interrogates the formal/informal nexus. As it shows, the formal and the informal are tightly intertwined, in South Africa and elsewhere. So much so that, as Callebert notes, the very distinction can quickly become problematic. Yet the formal/informal distinction appears here in rather abstract, even universalist, terms – despite Callebert’s sensitivity to the historical contingencies of people’s livelihoods. The reason is that he limits the analysis to resource distribution, and to ways of making ends meet. ‘The economy’ itself is presented as a self-evident entity. ‘Formality’ and ‘informality’ then appear as ‘sectors’, however entangled. Waged employment has always intersected with other areas of life in more complex ways than can be captured by material distribution. It is this complexity that shapes what ‘formal employment’ has meant in South

Introduction:: Becoming and Unbecoming Farm Workers in Southern Africa

More than most forms of employment in Southern Africa, farm work seems to evoke the past. Recent events, however, have foregrounded global integration and cost-cutting casualisation as much as plantation-style racialised hierarchies. Legacies of farmer paternalism, themselves shaped by workers’ on-site residence, have inflected changes in agriculture. But these changes invite fresh investigation of what we mean by “farm workers,” as a stereotyped and evocative label intersects with and shapes people’s terms of livelihood. This introduction offers an opening framing for five articles that examine how farm workers have become and unbecome, in the past and today. Incorporation into farm hierarchies remains crucial, but the category is political — imposed, claimed, denied, negotiated or transcended in the service of different interests and imaginaries. A wide array of processes shapes becoming a farm worker, from outright coercion to marginalisation, to corporate ethical frameworks. Similarly, unbecoming may be the result of losing a job or non-recognition, or indeed the collapse of a whole sector. The collection’s theme has important implications: how workers are defined is crucial amidst falling employment. In these circumstances, “workers” and “workplaces” have significance not only as straightforward descriptors, but as categories with claim-making power and historical resonance.

Introduction: Labour, insecurity and violence in South Africa

The police killing of scores of striking mineworkers at the Marikana Mines in 2012 triggered, as Beresford puts it, ‘a period of national introspection’ in South Africa. This gave new urgency to persistent questions about state violence and the repression of workers – and more broadly about widening inequality (the highest in the world) within the workforce, increasing levels of insecurity and deepening disaffection among South Africa’s disenfranchised workers. The violence at Marikana was explicit and dramatic. But in the aftermath, as protest spread beyond platinum to other mines and other industries across the country, the more everyday forms of overt and structural violence that define conditions of work and life for South African workers came into view. Marikana became a watchword for a new wave of disaffection, defiance, and protest by South Africa’s working and jobless poor, still waiting for the promise of economic liberation and social mobility to be realised. Similarly, while Marikana was its catalyst, this special issue of JSAS aims to go beyond the causes and outcomes of the violence there to address those broader questions about the interrelation of labour, insecurity and violence in South Africa today. Many of these struggles are not unique to South Africa. Yet the centrality of violence to South Africa’s labour arrangements – both underpinning and feeding off them – is a striking feature of the country’s history. The ‘precarious liberation’ of post-apartheid South Africa has produced its own vulnerabilities and frustrations, giving way to a new era of protest and claim-making. At the same time, Marikana focuses attention not only on the forms of violence and insecurity that are contested, but also on those that are left unchallenged. Building on a stream of panels organised for the African Studies Association UK (ASAUK) conference of 2014, the collection explores the broader canvas of labour insecurity, economic disenfranchisement, coercion, and the everyday enforcement of working conditions in South Africa. Most of the articles have a particular focus on the recent past, but they demonstrate