Rethinking precarity: understandings of and responses to precarity by Zimbabwean migrant security guards in South Africa’s PSI in Gauteng province

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dc.contributor.authorMurahwa, Brian
dc.date.accessioned2017-02-06T15:36:21Z
dc.date.available2017-02-06T15:36:21Z
dc.date.issued2016
dc.descriptionA dissertation submitted to the Global Labour University in conformity with the requirements of a MA in Labour Policy and Globalisation School of Social Sciences Faculty of Humanities University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg March 2016en_ZA
dc.description.abstractUnderstanding the subjective views of low skilled marginalised workers who occupy bottom ends of labour markets and are implicated in everyday precarious living and working conditions is crucial for advancing scholarship on precarity. This qualitative study grounded in a phenomenological theoretical framework highlights the disconnects between the academic understandings of precarity and an understanding of precariousness from Zimbabwean migrant security guards’ own perspective in South Africa’s Private Security Industry (PSI), Gauteng Province. Relying on data collected through a combination of an ethnographic experience in 2014 and in-depth face to face interviews I conducted from June 2015, this study examines the perceptions that migrant security guards have on precarity, the strategies and tactics they employ to navigate everyday precarious working and living conditions and most importantly, the rationale behind these workers continued stay and work under precarious situations. As workers with precarious backgrounds, the findings of this study reveals that migrant security guards treat wage employment instrumentally, a source of their livelihood that has led to improvements in their standards of living as interpreted by them. The strategies and tactics employed by these workers either individually or collectively are therefore rationally and tactically crafted so as not directly challenge and disrupt the existing structures (state, capital and law) but instead to survive within these structures so as not to jeopardise their main source of livelihood-wage employment. For migrant security guards, wage employment remains a vital tool for meeting their varied socio-economic and political objectives. This study therefore led to the conclusion that there is generally a mismatch between academic conceptualisation of precarity and the way marginalised and low skilled labour migrants interpret and understand circumstances.en_ZA
dc.description.librarianGR2017en_ZA
dc.format.extentOnline resource (ix, 111 leaves)
dc.identifier.citationMurahwa, Brian (2016) Rethinking precarity : understandings of and responses to precarity by Zimbabwean migrant security guards in South Africa's PSI in Gauteng province, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, <http://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/21894>
dc.identifier.urihttp://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/21894
dc.language.isoenen_ZA
dc.subject.lcshPrivate security services--South Africa--Gauteng
dc.subject.lcshSecurity guards--South Africa
dc.subject.lcshWork environment--South Africa--Gauteng
dc.subject.lcshForeign workers--South Africa
dc.subject.lcshPrecarious employment--South Africa
dc.titleRethinking precarity: understandings of and responses to precarity by Zimbabwean migrant security guards in South Africa’s PSI in Gauteng provinceen_ZA
dc.typeThesisen_ZA
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