Social citizenship and the transformations of wage labour in the making of Post-Apartheid South Africa, 1994-2001
Date
2006-10-27T08:00:31Z
Authors
Barchiesi, Franco
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Abstract
This work is an investigation of the relationships between waged labour and social citizenship
during the first decade of post-apartheid democracy in South Africa. In particular, I look at the ways
in which changing forms of work and employment have affected workers' access to social security,
contributory benefits and non-contributory grants. The dissertation analyses two case studies
(workers in the glass, paper and metal industry in the East Rand and Johannesburg municipal
employees) by focusing on how rising unemployment, job losses, precariousness and casualisation
impact on employees' social provisions. The research is connected to theoretical debates that, in the
developed and the developing world, have emphasised the importance of the waged condition and
of labour movements in expanding social security as part of the broader concept of social
citizenship. In classical theorisations, from T.H. Marshall to G. Esping-Andersen, social citizenship
defines a generation of rights premised on decommodification, or the provision of social goods
(including pensions, unemployment benefits, housing, healthcare and municipal services) as
entitlements aimed at minimising individual dependence on the labour market.
The concept of decommodification underpins this dissertation. My analysis of the
relationships between wage labour and social citizenship in South Africa is ultimately an inquiry of
the ways in which wage labour and working class organisations have been able to deepen and widen
the decommodification of workers’ livelihoods. This conceptual perspective is particularly relevant
to the South African case, especially in consideration of the decisive role played by organised
labour both in contributing to the downfall of apartheid and in spearheading post-apartheid
democratic institutions and progressive social policies. The historical role of organised labour in the
South African transition was not confined to workplace issues and unionised workers' concerns, but
it also emphasised broader demands for social citizenship rights, decommodified provisions and a
politics of community-based alliances. Influential scholarly works have often characterised these
aspects under the heading of "social movement unionism".
In a post-apartheid scenario, social movement unionism is increasingly embattled due to
rising unemployment and "atypical" employment, and to the adoption of market-orientated socioeconomic
policies by the post-1994 African National Congress government. Labour's ability to
promote agendas for decommodification and social citizenship are concurrently facing
uncomfortable realities and problematic questions. Has wage labour fulfilled its "promise" to be a
vehicle to expand the social rights of the working class and the poor? In which ways are
employment and labour market changes affecting organised labour's ability to expand areas of
societal decommodification? Are alternative identities and social citizenship discourses emerging in
response to the crisis of stable employment?
I address these questions by looking at workers' responses to the crisis of wage labour as
emerging in case studies “from below”, and at the ways in which such responses are framed and
elaborated within the post-1994 social policy discourse. A second component of my research,
therefore, is based on interviews with policy-makers and documentary analysis on the development
of social policy from 1994 to 2001, which emphasise shifting policy discourses on the wage laboursocial
citizenship interaction. In the final analysis, social citizenship emerges from this work not
merely as a static construct, centred on programmes and institutions, but as a terrain of negotiations
and a "contested field of signification", shaped by the encounter of institutional narratives and
meanings defined by grassroots agency.
The result of the research confirms that concepts of "social citizenship" and "wage labour"
are profoundly shaped by contradictions determined by underlying social contestation. In fact,
respondents in my case studies clearly perceive the crisis of stable, dignified employment as a
structural reality that requires systemic policy interventions. On the other hand, no homogenous
discourse is emerging in workers’ narratives to challenge deeply entrenched views of inclusion and
the social order as based on waged employment. Decommodification discourses, as for example
advanced by new social movements, remain therefore substantially limited. Conversely, the policy
discourse of democratic South Africa responds to the crisis, when not the actual disappearance, of
wage labour as a social reality with an aggressive reassertion of work ethic and wage discipline as
vehicles of social insertion and moral virtue. The ANC government often combines these arguments
with a clear rejecton of decommodification, often presented as "dependency" on welfare
"handouts", which undermines individual incentives for productive jobseeking behaviours.
The contradictions between the crisis of wage labour in social practices and modes of
reproduction, and the reasserted centrality of wage labour in the policy discourse as the main
modality of social citizenship and inclusion opens new directions for research and interrogates
changing forms of social identities, contestation and political legitimacy in the South African
transition.
Description
Faculty of Humanities and social sciences
School of social sciences
8508612p
F_barchiesi@yahoo.com
Keywords
South Africa, Social, Citizenship, Labour, Welfare