The role of social networks in alleviating precarity: the case of undocumented Zimbabwean migrants working in the private security industry in Johannesburg, South Africa

Abstract

Globalization is a new age phenomenon and nations need to establish new ways of dealing with the mass migration of people in search of livelihoods. This study, conducted in July 2017, aims to highlight the agency involved in the search for jobs in the private security industry (PSI) in Johannesburg, South Africa. It explains why undocumented Zimbabweans are favoured as employees instead of locals. In so doing, this study addresses and exposes the oppression of undocumented Zimbabwean migrants and demonstrates how they in turn reduce the effects of their precarity by exercising agency through utilising social networks to overcome the invisible effects of structure imposed through the economic policy of free markets and free trade. This study illustrates the modern-day paradigm of the desperation faced in neoliberalism, and how globalisation, a product of neoliberalism, perpetuates precarity, thereby encouraging the mass movement of people in order to seek employment. This simultaneously creates a precarity of location. Oppression results from the displacement and the economic precarity experienced. Owing to the limited alternatives or choices that migrants are faced with, the potential for oppression does not pose a deterrent in the decision to migrate. This study finds that foreigners, especially undocumented foreigners, are etherised. This study reveals the dimension of intersectionality in the lives of these migrants and how their subjectivities are perpetuated. Furthermore, it highlights the reality of the plight of those who risk their lives and wellbeing to protect strangers and how remittances play a key role in the decision to migrate. A central theme deduced from this research exposes how neoliberalism has exacerbated the precarity whilst concurrently tainting the essence of agency. It is also observes that choices which are made, are inauthentic by even submitting to oppression as a choice; tolerating xenophobia and succumbing to exploitation. In this study, I have highlighted three core themes in the Theoretical Framework, namely precarity, agency and oppression. The latter two juxtaposed concepts carry very different definitions, since the former enables and the latter disables. In this particular study, however, these two concepts explain the "lived realities" of undocumented migrants working in the PSI in Johannesburg. The participants in this study reveal how they are exploited, the manner in which they experience xenophobia and powerlessness, and how social networks are used to overcome some of these forms of oppression but also how it facilitates migration. In addition, precarity 2 has also created conditions that perpetuate insecurities, hence migrants resort to life-and death choices in order to remit and provide for their families. I am surprised by the sense of accountability and responsibility that the migrants exercise through the migration process, in spite of all the parameters that constrain their assimilation into their country of destination. This study dwells deep into the migration of these individuals; the difficulty they endure and provides a perspective which detracts from the image that foreigners come to South Africa to "take our jobs and steal".