3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
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Item How have Temporary Employment Services (TES) in South Africa Responded to the Labour Relations Amendment Act’s Regulation of Labour Brokers? a study of assign case(2019) Nkosi, Joshua MalambuleThis report focuses on one aspect of the 2014 Labour Relations Act Amendments. The Act was introduced after many calls by scholars and the labour movement alike to address, inter alia, the exploitation of workers by Temporary Employment Services (TES), popularly known as labour brokers (as will be interchangeably used in this research report), and to ban TES.Item Precarious workers, their power and the ways to realise it: the struggle of Heineken labour broker workers(2017) Englert, ThomasThe dissertation examines the power of precarious workers through the analysis of the campaign of labour brokered workers to be made permanent under equal conditions at Heineken Brewery in Sedibeng, South of Johannesburg. It contributes to the discussion on the growing importance of precarious work in the formal sector in South Africa through externalisation and the effect thereof on the labour movement and the institutions of labour relations. It examines how precarious workers rely on self organisation to mobilise power resources to disrupt the status quo. Taking an engaged approach, the work relies on workplace mapping to co-construct, with workers and organisers, an understanding of how different employers, working conditions and status are used to divide workers and fragment the workplace to enforce low labour costs and control at the Sedibeng Brewery. The map also emphasizes the central role these workers play in the production process. The dissertation then describes how the workers use the law – institutional power –, in particular the amended section 198 of the LRA to try and overcome their divisions. They do so with the help of the Casual Workers Advice Office, a labour NGO. The chapter emphasises the law as a terrain of contestation by showing that this approach is not without problems. In the final chapter, the interdependence of associational, institutional, societal and structural power underlines that the precarious workers at Heineken relied on power resources located outside the shopfloor to start mounting an effective challenge to the workplace order inside the brewery. The dissertation concludes that contrary to the often expressed view, at least in this case study, precarious workers do organise but that they do so outside of the established unions, a phenomenon that is understudied. Although the struggle of these workers is very much about integration, it connects with deeper narratives and struggles against inequality in post-apartheid South Africa. Finally, the case study raises the question of how these dynamics could affect the traditional model of industrial unionism in the future: revitalise or transform it.Item Precarious workers, the casual workers' advice office and the 2014 labour relations act amendments(2017) Lenka, LefaThe contemporary precariousness of workers in South Africa can be understood from the historical development of South African labour regulations and policies. The acceleration of globalisation in the 1970s and the 1980s posed the labour movement with a challenge of flexible labour that rendered many workers precarious. Labour broking/Temporary Employment Services, part-time and contract work became the central strategy of capital rejuvenating itself and to avoid costs and legislation. This forced workers to engage in other forms of struggles to fight their precarious status as they found themselves on the periphery of the labour movement and legislative protection. In 2012 the government introduced the Labour Relations Bill that came to take effect in 2015 as the Labour Relations Act Amendment of 2014 to protect these groups of workers against the super-exploitative practices of flexible labour. This thesis explores the struggles of precarious workers at (and the role of) the Casual Workers’ Advice Office (CWAO) and self-organisation of workers in contemporary South Africa following the 2014 Labour Relations Amendments Act. The dissertation provides cases and notes struggles of workers at CWAO who sought to access their rights in terms of the LRA Amendments of 2014. It argues that the pursuit of legal struggles of various forms of precarious workers - TES, part-time and contract workers was important, but central to their victories was their own self-organisation, labour education and the role CWAO and David Cartwright Attorneys played in their struggles.