The Paradoxical Politics of South African Labour: Unions and the the Fight Against Precarity

As neoliberalism has undermined formal wage work across the global South, labor scholars have increasingly turned their attention away from organized and formally employed workers and towards the growing sections of the “precariat”. A large literature has blossomed examining the politics of precarious, informal, and unemployed workers. Behind this precarious turn in labor studies is an assumption that these workers will be the primary source of a new labor politics that looks beyond issues of wages and working conditions and towards broader questions of livelihood and social reproduction. However, in South Africa, while precarious workers' movements have remained disparate and unorganized, formal workers unions have taken up a range of issues---such as a universal national health insurance, a basic income grant, and land reform---that constitute a new politics of the precarious. This is surprising given that many of the policies that unions advocate would involve the subsidization of precarious workers' livelihoods by the minority of formally employed organized workers. In order to explain this paradox the paper draws on nationally representative household survey data as well as one year of field work in three rural areas and one major urban center. The data show that the decline of formal wage labor has led to an increasing social and economic interdependence between large sections of South Africa's precarious and formally employed workers. The case shows the importance of understanding the ways in which the rise of precarity has reshaped not only work, but also workers' households and broader social lives. It also shows the role that “old” organizations can play in the “new” politics of labor.