European Journal of
East Asian Studies 17 (2018) 181–191
European Journal
of
East Asian Studies
brill.com/ejea
Capitalist Trajectories in Mekong Southeast Asia
Dennis Arnold
University of Amsterdam
D.L.Arnold@uva.nl
Stephen Campbell
Nanyang Technological University and University of Bergen
Stephen.Campbell@ntu.edu.sg
Recent scholarship on labour and development in the global South has
renewed critiques of modernisation theory along two main lines. The first
has highlighted the unsuccessful transition of peasant smallholders into wage
workers, whose incomes and employment benefits, it was once argued, would
both satisfy their social reproduction needs and allow for expanded consump-
tion. As a consequence of this apparently ‘stalled transition’ a contradiction
has emerged between modernisation theory’s valorisation of wage labour/full
employment, and the precarious reality of work and un/underemployment in
contemporary capitalism.
The second critique to emerge has focused on the failure of numerous late
industrialising economies to transition from low to high value-added manu-
facturing. In the face of this latter failure of the modernisation project, govern-
ments and non-governmental advisers have sought to adapt their strategies to
more effectively regulate growth in low value-added accumulation. Among the
more prominent illustrations of such adaptive responses, international finan-
cial institutions and development think-tanks have advocated expanded forms
of spatially regulated industrialisation—including export processing zones,
industrial corridors and integrated subregions, of which the Greater Mekong
Subregion (GMS) is a prominent example.
There is, however, limited evidence to date that the promise of well-remu-
nerated wage labour is likely to be realised anytime soon. The evident con-
tradiction between the promise and the reality of contemporary development
strategies has led to disillusionment with industrial and other forms of waged
and non-waged work. As a result, growing frictions at the point of produc-
tion and beyond have emerged, exposing tensions and fissures in development
models across the Mekong region.
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mailto:D.L.Arnold@uva.nl
mailto:Stephen.Campbell@ntu.edu.sg
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European Journal of East Asian Studies 17 (2018) 181–191
What happens, we thus need to ask, when low value-added export-oriented
factories that are central to long-term strategies for economic growth at a sub-
regional level fail to serve as a stepping stone to higher value-added manu-
facturing, as modernisation and global value chain theories would have us
believe? How do states, and workers and their families and communities, adapt
to and address the apparent lock-in of low-value, precarious subcontracting
economies at the national and sub-regional scale? If contemporary authoritar-
ianism in late-developing Southeast Asia utilises ‘pro-poor’ economic growth
paradigms to renew consent among its population, how can this be sustained
when these models are predicated on a low-waged, low value-added labouring
poor? This special issue seeks to address these and related questions.
Employing a wider comparative lens, the present trajectories of capitalist
development in Mekong Southeast Asia suggest similarities, as well as sig-
nificant differences, with late-capitalist developments in the global North,
and they raise important questions about emerging patterns of development
within the global South. We therefore look to Mekong Southeast Asia as an
important locus for questioning received narratives of ‘development’, ‘mod-
ernisation’ and ‘transition’, many of which—whether their roots lie in Marxian
or modernisation theory lineages—were derived from the historical experi-
ences of Euro-American industrialisation. One of the overarching questions
orienting this collection of articles is thus whether, and in what ways, the par-
ticular histories and trajectories of capitalist development in the global South,
and in Mekong Southeast Asia specifically, challenge such received narratives
(and continuing expectations) of capitalist development. Orienting our respec-
tive inquiries loosely around this question, this special issue aims to rethink
capitalist development in the global South from the vantage point of Mekong
Southeast Asia.
In taking seriously difference, particularity and heterogeneity in the his-
tories and trajectories of capitalist development in Mekong Southeast Asia,
this collection of articles follows the ‘materialist turn’ in postcolonial studies.1
We include Thailand for inquiry under a postcolonial rubric both because of
the developmental parallels it shares with other postcolonial countries and
because of its own ‘crypto-colonial’ history under the Bowring Treaty of 1855.2
A starting point of this ‘turn’ is recognising that the global dominance of mod-
1 Sandro Mezzadra, ‘Bringing Capital Back In: A Materialist Turn in Postcolonial Studies?’Inter-
Asia Cultural Studies 12, 1 (2011): 154–164.
2 Michael Herzfeld, ‘The Absent Presence: Discourses of Crypto-Colonialism’, South Atlantic
Quarterly 101, 4 (2002): 899–926; see also Thongchai Winichakul, ‘Siam’s Colonial Condi-
tions and the Birth of Thai History’, in Southeast Asian Historiography: Unravelling The Myths:
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European Journal of East Asian Studies 17 (2018) 181–191
ern capitalism seems more and more disentangled from any world order cen-
tred upon the primacy of the US, Europe or Japan ‘as the real invariable in the
axiomatic of modernity’.3 Pursuing this line of inquiry demands, as well, that
we attend to processes of subjectification, as they are shaped by the varied
experiences of capitalist development in the region. For it is out of this mul-
tiplicity of subjectivities, grounded in material experiences, that new forms of
politics and struggle emerge.
If the trajectories of capitalist development in Mekong Southeast Asia illus-
trate a heterogeneous unfolding of capitalist relations, this heterogeneous
unfolding calls for a more critical interrogation of ongoing claims of ‘transition’
to a predetermined liberal-democratic end-point. Indeed, the very concept of
‘transition’—born of a particular Western European historical experience—
carries with it historicist assumptions of shifts from traditional to modern,
informal to formal, agrarian to industrial and petty producer to wage worker,
which fail to sufficiently capture the dynamics and multiple trajectories of cap-
italist development in the postcolonial world.4
Our collective project is, however, of significance not only for theorising cap-
italist development in the global South, for the present trajectories of capitalist
development in the South may very well foreshadow emerging trends in the
North. Jan Breman and Marcel van der Linden have, for example, argued that
contemporary manifestations of flexible and precarious labour in the global
North follow earlier patterns of casual and informal employment long preva-
lent in the South.5 More broadly, Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff have sug-
gested that ‘it is the south that often is the first to feel the effects of world-
historical forces, the south in which radically new assemblages of capital and
labour are taking shape, thus to prefigure the future of the global north’.6 Might
we then consider the frontiers of capital in Mekong Southeast Asia not as
marginal to global capitalist formations, but rather at the centre?7 How, in
addition, might a clearer analytical grasp of the dynamics, trajectories and het-
Essays In Honour of Barend Jan Terwiel, ed. Volker Grabowsky (Bangkok: River Books, 2011),
20–43.
3 Mezzadra, ‘Bringing Capital Back In’, 157.
4 Kalyan Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality
and Post-colonial Capitalism (New Delhi: Routledge, 2007).
5 Jan Breman and Marcel van der Linden, ‘Informalizing the Economy: The Return of the Social
Question at a Global Level’, Development and Change 45, 5 (2014): 920–940.
6 Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America is Evolving
Toward Africa (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 12.
7 Etienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2003).
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erogeneity of ‘frontier’ labour and capital stimulate critical analysis of capitalist
development in the global North, and of evolving capitalist relations between
North and South, whether these be through capital relocation, international
migrant flows or global supply chains? By working through notions of core–
periphery and North–South this line of inquiry points to a different vantage
of inter-state, institutional and other relations and networks, while also chal-
lenging inherited and readily accepted binaries such as informal–formal, rural–
urban and the like.
The articles collected for this special issue engage the issues and questions
touched on above through case studies from Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thai-
land and Vietnam. Methodologically, the authors varyingly employ ethnogra-
phy, the extended case method and participant observation as operationalised
in anthropology, development studies, geography, labour and industrial rela-
tions, and sociology. Marxian approaches to labour and development comprise
a common blueprint for these interventions, with varying attention to post-
colonial studies, workerist/autonomist theory and critical industrial relations,
alongside cross-disciplinary debates around the multiscalar politics of power
in the global economy. In order to situate these papers within contemporary
debates surrounding late-capitalist development in the global South, we out-
line in the remainder of this introduction four thematic areas under which to
group the various topics covered by this special issue’s contributors. Specifi-
cally, these are: the truncated agrarian transition; informal, informalised and
flexibilised labour; stunted industrial upgrading; and emergent forms of poli-
tics and struggle.
1 The Truncated Agrarian Transition
Modernisation theory is predicated on a historicist narrative that sees peasant
smallholders move from the farm to the factory, with informal labour giving
way to formal employment—most significantly within expanding industrial
manufacturing sectors.8 Contemporary developments in Mekong Southeast
Asia challenge this historicist narrative. We see, instead, patterns of jobless
growth, ‘saturated’ industrial labour markets, the informalisation of industrial
production and the growth of surplus populations lacking access to formal
waged employment.9 It is for this reason that Henry Bernstein suggests a shift
8 Arthur Lewis, ‘Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour’, The Manchester
School 22, 2 (1954): 139–191.
9 Tania Murray Li, ‘Centering Labor in the Land Grab Debate’, Journal of Peasant Studies 38,
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away from the classic agrarian question, to ask instead a contemporary agrarian
question of labour.10 While the former considers the capitalist transformation
of agriculture in the service of growing urban industrial production, the latter
attends to the proliferating (and largely informal) ‘classes of labour’ and surplus
populations, as one-time peasants are expelled from smallholder agricultural
production without being fully absorbed into formal employment—industrial
or otherwise.
Despite the glaring lack—indeed, well into the foreseeable future—of well-
remunerated formal employment, regional governments and policy advisors
continue to valorise waged employment over redistributive social welfare pro-
grammes as the most effective means of meeting the social reproduction needs
of dispossessed populations. This discrepancy between the hype and reality of
(un)employment is by no means limited to Southeast Asia.11 But its persistence
in the discourse of the region’s politicians and ‘development’ actors pushes
us to ask what ideological ends such continued appeals to salvation-through-
employment serve in the context of the region’s ‘stalled transitions’.
2 Informal, Informalised and Flexibilised Labour
Modernisation theorists, such as Arthur Lewis, posited that a ‘modern’, ‘capi-
talist’ sector in developing countries would draw individuals away from rural
subsistence labour and into formal—particularly industrial—employment.12
When the concept of the ‘informal economy’ first emerged in the early 1970s,
it was understood primarily as self-employment, and as a temporary economic
strategy that rural-to-urban migrants drew on while they waited for their full
incorporation into formal, urban employment.13 In Mekong Southeast Asia,
like much of the global South, the formalisation of labour has not played
out as predicted. It has, in addition, been clear, ever since Jan Breman’s clas-
2 (2011): 281–298; Tania Murray Li, Land’s End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Fron-
tier (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
10 Henry Bernstein, ‘“Changing Before Our Very Eyes”: Agrarian Questions and the Politics
of Land in Capitalism Today’, Journal of Agrarian Change 4, 1–2 (2004): 190–225; Henry
Bernstein, ‘Is There an Agrarian Question in the 21st Century?’, Canadian Journal of Devel-
opment Studies 27, 4 (2006): 449–460.
11 Franco Barchiesi, Precarious Liberation Workers, the State, and Contested Social Citizenship
in Postapartheid South Africa (New York: SUNY Press, 2011).
12 Arthur Lewis, ‘Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour’.
13 Keith Hart, ‘Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana’, Journal of
Modern African Studies 11 (1973): 61–89.
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sic critique of labour market dualism, that formal and informal labour mar-
kets are interpenetrated and that, far from being limited to ‘self-employment’,
informality has come to increasingly characterise waged labour across the
board.14
There is thus both a persistence and a proliferation of informal forms of
labour and production, including within sectors and enterprises that were
once iconic of formal employment, such as large-scale industrial manufactur-
ing. But what, specifically, are the emerging patterns of informal and infor-
malised labour in Mekong Southeast Asia? How does the present multiplic-
ity of forms of informal labour and production relate to, and interpenetrate
with, formal employment and legally registered enterprises? And how do the
de facto informal conditions of ‘formal sector’ employment force a rethink
of the formal–informal binary?15 Going further, what are the implications of
abandoning the idea that modern capitalism is defined by a ‘normal’ capital–
labour relation, or ‘free’ wage labour?16 Global labour historians have consid-
ered the heterogeneity of labour relations as a characteristic of the colonial
and postcolonial world, a sign of ‘backwardness’ to be overcome by devel-
opment.17 In the neoliberal era, the crisis of Fordism and global outsourcing
have contributed to a re-emergence of this heterogeneity that has been scru-
tinised under varying labels, including flexibilisation, informalisation and pre-
carity.
Despite aspirations for global relevance, much of the literature on labour
flexibilisation and precarious work is derived from the recent experiences of
the global North—Guy Standing’s The Precariat being a prominent example.18
Within this literature, flexibilisation is commonly linked, both historically and
structurally, to deindustrialisation, a shift to services and a sharp decline from
a highpoint of unionised industrial employment in mid-twentieth-century
Fordist–Keynesian North Atlantic welfare states.19To be sure, employment flex-
ibilisation and the expansion of precarious employment have been widely
14 Jan Breman, ‘A Dualistic Labour System? A Critique of the “Informal Sector” Concept: I:
The Informal Sector’, Economic and Political Weekly 11, 48 (1976): 1870–1876.
15 Dae-Oup Chang, ‘Informalising Labour in Asia’s Global Factory’, Journal of Contemporary
Asia 39, 2 (2009): 161–179.
16 Marcel van der Linden and Karl Heinz Roth (eds), Beyond Marx: Theorising the Global
Labour Relations of the Twenty-First Century (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
17 Mezzadra, ‘Bringing Capital Back In’.
18 Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: Bloomsbury Academic,
2011).
19 Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, ‘Precarity as a Political Concept, or, Fordism as Exception’,
Theory, Culture, Society 25, 7–8 (2008): 51–72.
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documented in Southeast Asia.20 Yet the regional experience is one of flexi-
bilisation overlaying industrialisation, rather than deindustrialisation. This has
consequences for the kinds of questions that need to be asked. How, for exam-
ple, do present patterns of flexible industrial wage labour in Mekong Southeast
Asia shape or limit popular demands for stable, well-remunerated industrial
employment?
3 Stunted Industrial Upgrading
Regional economies have demonstrated an inability to move, under the cur-
rent international division of labour, from low value-added to high value-added
industrial production. In Mekong Southeast Asia, consequently, there is a per-
sistence of low-waged, low value-added industrial production, especially in
apparel, footwear and electronics assembly. What are the effects of popular dis-
content over precarious employment and unemployment against the backdrop
of an unrealised promise to upgrade to well-remunerated industrial employ-
ment? How, in addition, have governments and private capitalists adapted
their accumulation strategies to maintain and increase profit in the face of this
stunted industrial upgrading? Among such strategies, one prominent example
in Mekong Southeast Asia has been the spatial relocation of capital to sites
that can exploit geopolitical and internal borders as means to regulate labour
mobility and workers’ organising.21 This has involved a proliferation of internal
regulatory borders, as well as the de jure and de facto segmentation—indeed,
fragmentation—of labour markets along lines of gender, ethnicity, citizenship
and legal status. On the one hand, such regulation elicits questions around
the role of regionally extended labour regimes in which East Asian capital
and states, as well as international organisations, including the ILO, operate.
Efforts to harness labour in the Mekong for Asia regional- and global-scale cap-
ital accumulation points to a need to understand the multiple and variegated
mix of ‘formal’ tripartite institutions as well as more informal and regionally
articulated state–state, state–capital and capital–labour relations. On the other
hand, heterogeneity is not only constitutive of the production of subjectivity
20 For example, Kevin Hewison and Arne L. Kalleberg, ‘Precarious Work and Flexibilization
in South and Southeast Asia’, American Behavioral Scientist 57, 4 (2012): 395–402; Dennis
Arnold and John Pickles, ‘Global Work, Surplus Labor and the Precarious Economies of
the Border’, Antipode 43, 5 (2011): 1598–624; Frederic Deyo, Reforming Asian Labor Systems:
Economic Tensions and Worker Dissent (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012).
21 Arnold and Pickles, ‘Global Work’.
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under capitalism: it may also shape the language and strategies of any project
of liberation and critique of capitalism.22
One response to limited livelihood improvements has been increasing
appeals to citizen workers to make short-term sacrifices for long-run national
economic development—with implications for spaces of protest. For instance,
in the case of China, Aihwa Ong provides a useful illustration of variegated
state strategies of rule.23 She points out that every day the Chinese state faces
numerous incidents of labour or peasant unrest, most of which are harshly
put down or left unreported. However, by tolerating recent worker demon-
strations against select foreign companies, the state permits mass resentment
against global capital.The selective political approach to worker unrest demon-
strates a complex state engagement with the still-resonant notion of people’s
or nation’s sovereign territory versus the threat of foreign capital. The state
goal is to manipulate the political situation in order to achieve an implicit
state–society bargain that trades acceptance of political authoritarianism for
sustained improvements in economic and social well-being. The authoritar-
ian state, in its multifaceted embroilment with global capital, she contends,
cannot be frozen in a posture of opposition to the masses, but must strate-
gically intervene in unstable conditions, one moment acting as a draconian
oppressor of workers, the next as a protector of labour against the depre-
dations of global capital. What happens, then, in contexts like the Mekong
where improvements in economic and social well-being are lagging or mov-
ing in reverse gear? The cases of Cambodia and Myanmar and the repression
of workers’ protests in export-oriented industrial zones is instructive in this
regard, as are widespread protests of rage by Vietnamese workers outside the
gates of ‘Chinese’ firms in 2014 that went largely unchecked by authorities.
What kinds of ‘mass’ protest do workers in the Mekong employ, what are the
logics and strategies, and what responsive strategies do workers’ movements
induce?
4 Emergent Forms of Politics and Struggle
The stunted agrarian transition and the de jure and de facto informalisation of
labour challenge political strategies and tactics derived from liberal and radi-
cal traditions that privilege workplace organising and struggle by a mass indus-
22 Mezzadra, ‘Bringing Capital Back In’.
23 Aihwa Ong, ‘Powers of Sovereignty: State, People, Wealth, Life’, Focaal—Journal of Global
and Historical Anthropology 64, (2012): 24–35.
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trial proletariat employed in large-scale factories and mines. To be sure, mass
strikes, both within and outside formal unions, continue in Mekong South-
east Asia, and they should not be treated as an outmoded form of struggle.
Indeed, the scale of industrial strikes in the GMS speaks to the divergent class
trajectories between the deindustrialising and post-industrial global North,
and industrialising Asia. Nonetheless, questions remain about the ways that
employment flexibilisation, including constraints on formal unionisation in
some contexts and its proliferation in others within the GMS, has shaped the
forms and dynamics of industrial strikes under the region’s particular precari-
ous conditions, highlighting the changing role of trade unions and other civil
society organisations operating from local to global scales.
At the same time, the contemporary proliferation of casual employment and
informal petty commodity production within the GMS demands a better grasp
of the forms of politics by dispossessed populations located outside formal
industrial employment. How, we might then ask, do the particularities of cap-
italist development in the GMS shape and make possible certain forms of poli-
tics and struggle among dispossessed and (often informally) exploited popula-
tions? Under such conditions, are emergent forms of struggle best understood
as popular claims on the state, shaped by the conditions of a dispossessed ‘polit-
ical society’?24 Has the fragmented spatial segmentation of regional labour
markets motivated migrants, both rural–urban and cross-border, to employ
their very mobility in order to contest such forms of spatialised regulation?
And what forms of struggle remain possible for those who are at once exploited
outside direct wage relations while also lacking the leverage of electoral mobil-
isation?25
References
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(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
24 Partha Chatterjee, Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
25 The papers that comprise this special issue were initially discussed at a workshop held
at the University of Amsterdam in November 2016, with financial support provided by
The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (Veni grant no. 016.135.215).
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https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=crea20
From the shop floor to the kitchen table: the
shifting centre of precarious workers’ politics in
South Africa
Ben Scully
To cite this article: Ben Scully (2016) From the shop floor to the kitchen table: the shifting centre of
precarious workers’ politics in South Africa, Review of African Political Economy, 43:148, 295-311,
DOI: 10.1080/03056244.2015.1085378
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03056244.2015.1085378
From the shop floor to the kitchen table: the shifting centre of
precarious workers’ politics in South Africa
Ben Scully
∗
Department of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
This article argues that, as wage work has become more precarious, the importance of
the household in the livelihood strategies of precarious South African workers has
increased. The shifting importance of the household in relation to the workplace in
the economic lives of workers has implications for the political strategies that these
workers adopt. The article draws on data from a national household survey combined
with insights from the author’s fieldwork across rural and urban sites in South Africa.
It contributes to the growing literature on the politics of precarious work in the global
South.
Keywords: labour movements; precarious work; South Africa; COSATU; social
movements; livelihoods
[De l’atelier à la table de la cuisine : la base changeante des politiques en faveur des
travailleurs précaires en Afrique du Sud.] Cet article soutient que, puisque le travail
salarié devient de plus en plus précaire, l’importance du ménage dans les stratégies en
matière d’amélioration des moyens de subsistance des travailleurs précaires sud-
africains a augmenté. L’importance changeante du ménage en relation avec le lieu de
travail dans la vie économique des travailleurs a des implications sur les stratégies
politiques que ces travailleurs adoptent. Cet article se base sur des données de
l’enquête nationale sur les ménages combinées, avec des idées provenant du travail
de terrain de l’auteur dans des sites ruraux et urbains en Afrique du Sud. L’article
contribue aux publications sur la politique du travail précaire dans le Sud, qui sont en
nombre croissant.
Mots-clés : mouvements de main d’oeuvre ; travail précaire ; Afrique du Sud ;
COSATU ; mouvements sociaux ; moyens d’existence
The labour movement in the global South is in the midst of a prolonged crisis. Over the past
few decades the financialisation of capital, the globalisation of production and the rise of
ideologies of flexibility in the workplace have undermined the formal wage workers who
are the traditional base of organised labour. This crisis has sparked a wide-ranging
debate on the future of the labour movement. Many scholars and activists have turned to
the question of labour movement revitalisation, searching for strategies and tactics that
might allow existing unions to incorporate the growing ranks of unorganised and precarious
workers (Bonner and Spooner 2011; Milkman and Voss 2004; Turner 2005; Von Holdt and
Webster 2008). While these authors recognise the great challenge posed to unions by the
rise of precarious forms of work, they remained convinced that, as Bonner and Spooner
have put it,
# 2015 ROAPE Publications Ltd
∗Email: Ben.Scully@wits.ac.za
Review of African Political Economy, 2016
Vol. 43, No. 148, 295 – 311, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03056244.2015.1085378
mailto:Ben.Scully@wits.ac.za
there are compelling practical and political reasons for trade unions to take the lead in [organ-
ising precarious workers] if they are to retain or rebuild their influence with employers and gov-
ernments, and their legitimacy as the voice and true representatives of the broad working class.
(2011, 87)
In contrast, other observers have taken the position that labour unions are unlikely to regain
their role as the primary organisational home of the working class. In this view, the erosion
of formal wage work has undermined the basis of the broadly shared material interests that
defined traditional labour politics. As a result, unions are seen as a form of political organ-
isation whose time is past. Guy Standing, for example, has argued that because unions were
built to represent workers in a specific type of formal work arrangement, ‘[p]rogressives
must stop expecting unions to become something contrary to their functions’ (2011,
168). In Manuel Castells’ words, the unions of today are doomed to ‘[run] behind the
new society, like dusty flags of forgotten wars’ (2004, 420).
In recent years, a third position has arisen in this debate which can be summarised as a
focus on what Ching Kwan Lee and Yelizavetta Kofman call a ‘politics of precarity’ (Lee
and Kofman 2012). This position starts from the observation that collective action around
issues related to work has not disappeared, and is unlikely to, despite the rise of precarious
forms of employment. However, in contrast to the labour revitalisation literature, this work
does not focus on precarious workers from the perspective of existing unions, but instead
treats them as important contemporary political actors in their own right. These authors take
as a given that precarious workers will continue to struggle, but not necessarily through the
same organisational forms and over the same issues as do workers of the traditional labour
movement. The declining relevance of the ‘traditional politics of labour’ (Paret, forthcom-
ing) to the majority of the world’s workers requires a shift in focus to the emergent politics
of precarity for scholars and activists who want to understand the future of economic
struggles.
Although this literature is relatively new, it has begun to produce important insights
into the new forms that precarious workers’ politics are taking around the world. Jennifer
Chun (2009) has highlighted the way in which marginalised workers in South Korea and
the United States have turned to ‘symbolic leverage’ as traditional forms of workers’
power have been eroded. She argues that marginalised workers often attempt to ‘[redir-
ect] the site of struggle from narrowly defined workplace disputes to public contestations
over values and meanings’ (173), making appeals which are based in ‘moral and cultural
understandings [as much as] economic calculations . . . ’ (7). Marcel Paret finds a similar
style of claim making among precarious workers in Gauteng, South Africa whose
demands reflect a ‘politics of recognition’ centred on a struggle for dignity and social
worth rather than simply workplace-based demands (Paret, forthcoming). Rina Agarwala,
studying home workers in India, has shown that, in contrast to traditional labour organ-
isations that put demands to employers, precarious workers tend to see the state as the
actor responsible for providing for their well-being (Agarwala 2013). Similarly, Matteo
Rizzo’s study of taxi drivers in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, shows the role that appeals
to the state can play, not only for questions of general social protection, but as a lever
of structural power which precarious workers can use against their immediate employers.
Rizzo details the example of Dar es Salaam’s drivers who lobbied the government to
amend laws so that negligent taxi owners, rather than the drivers they employ, would
be held responsible for traffic violations associated with unsafe taxi vehicles (Rizzo
2013). Lee and Kofman, summarising the insights of this emerging literature, conclude
that,
296 B. Scully
. . . in the global south, precariousness at work creates not just a crisis of job quality at the point
of production but also a crisis of social reproduction. Therefore, responses to precarious
employment almost always problematise the work – citizenship nexus, connecting labour poli-
tics to state politics . . . (Lee and Kofman 2012, 389)
From politics of labour to a politics of precarity
This analysis of collective action by precarious workers in the global South is essential
to understanding the changes taking place in class politics with the erosion of formal
wage labour. However, the emerging literature on precarious politics suffers from the
limitation that the examples of collective action on which it focuses remain, in almost
all parts of the world, relatively isolated and uncommon events. The vast majority of pre-
carious workers are not organised and do not make collective demands around issues of
work. It is still unclear what the implications of these innovative, but still numerically
marginal, precarious workers movements are for the unorganised majority of precarious
workers in the global South. Do these new forms of organising and making demands
point towards the possibility of a revitalisation of a labour movement that could rep-
resent the interests of the excluded majority of contemporary global capitalism? Or
will such experiments remain rooted in a small section of the swelling ranks of precar-
ious workers?
A more complete understanding of how the rise of precarious work has transformed
workers’ politics cannot come only from an analysis of scattered examples of precarious
workers’ organisations. Instead it must proceed from an analysis of the social and economic
conditions of precarious workers as a whole, which may (or may not) provide common
interests and experiences around which a precarious politics could form. In this way, the
concept of a politics of precarity should mirror the concept of a traditional politics of
labour which it is critiquing.
The concept of a ‘politics of labour’ conveys the idea that workers in capitalist econom-
ies share certain material and political interests by virtue of their position in the production
process. This idea is not drawn only from an observation of workers’ organisations and col-
lective action. Instead it is rooted in a set of clear assumptions around workers and their
experience of work. The ideo-typical workers who advanced the traditional politics of
labour were assumed to be fully proletariansed, that is, their livelihood depended on
their ability to earn a wage. Solidarity and commonality of interests were assumed to
result from the shared daily experience of a common workplace. In most cases of sustained
traditional labour movements, some form of social contract was assumed to govern the
relationship between employers and workers, setting limits on the terrain of labour –
capital conflict.
It is reasonable to assume that as the validity of these assumptions has been eroded, the
political interests of the working class have also changed. However, understanding the
emerging politics of precarity is not as simple as turning our attention from the common
experiences of traditional workers to those of precarious workers. The term ‘precarious
work’ is used to describe a broad and diverse range of experiences, from wage workers
in outsourced, part-time or temporary arrangements to the unemployed and self-employed
poor who make up what Michael Denning (2010) calls the ‘wageless’ segments of contem-
porary globalised capitalism. In order to understand what, if any, political interests this
broad range of workers shares it is necessary to ask what the common experiences are of
precarious work. This article takes up this question in a specific place, contemporary
Review of African Political Economy 297
South Africa. The article draws on nationally representative household survey data com-
bined with interviews and observations from the author’s field work among precarious
workers in both rural and urban sites in South Africa. It asks the question, are there
common experiences among the diversity of precarious workers that point towards some
general politics of precarity in South Africa?
The findings of the article both confirm and add specificity to the emerging concept of a
politics of precarity. The data from South Africa show that precarious workers have
complex economic lives, relying on a combination of diverse income sources including,
but not limited to, their own wage in order to gain a livelihood. The primary site through
which incomes are combined and livelihoods are produced is the precarious workers’
households. As a result, these workers’ material interests are centred on their household
livelihood strategies rather than their workplace. For many of these individuals, their
primary identity is not that of precarious worker but rather that of a family or household
member. Increasingly, class interests and identities are constructed not on the shop floor
but around the kitchen table. This shift has important implications for attempts to build
broad-based organisations or coalitions among precarious workers. What unites these
workers is not their experience of work, but their experience of precarity which requires
diversified household-centred livelihood strategies.
Precarious households: the hidden abode of reproduction
Traditional conceptions of the politics of labour have been rooted firmly in the workplace.
Workers’ material interests are thought to be shaped by their experiences in that hidden
abode of production. As ideo-typical formal wage work has been eroded, workers’ ties
to the workplace have been loosened and they have increasingly begun to rely on social
and kinship networks in order to gain a livelihood. The household, what Bill Martin and
Mark Beittel have called ‘the hidden abode of reproduction’ (1987), has become increas-
ingly central in shaping precarious workers’ material well-being. The importance of the
household is neither new nor exclusive to precarious workers. As Joan Smith and Immanuel
Wallerstein have argued:
the appropriate operational unit for analysing the ways in which people fit into the ‘labor force’
is not the individual but the ‘household’, defined . . . as the social unit that effectively over long
periods of time enables individuals, of varying ages and both sexes, to pool income coming
from multiple sources in order to ensure their individual and collective well-being. (Smith
and Wallerstein 1992, 12)
However, the rise of precarious work has increased the centrality of the household, shifting
a larger portion of the burden of social reproduction from the labour market to the
household.
Given its importance to precarious workers’ livelihoods, the household is a key site in
which to think about the politics of precarity. For precarious workers the experience of the
workplace varies widely, ranging from something resembling a ‘standard employment
relationship’ to informalised sites of self-employment to periods of open unemployment
in which there is no workplace at all. The vast majority of precarious workers do,
despite this variation in workplace experiences, situate their livelihood strategies within a
social network that can be described as a household. Households are typically centred on
a common place of residence, but household connections, in the sense of Smith and
298 B. Scully
Wallerstein’s definition, can extend beyond a specific location, often, for example, stretch-
ing across spaces of migration.
In the analysis presented below, precarious workers are situated within households. This
is not meant to romanticise the household as a site of mutuality and cooperation. As has
been well documented, households are sites of conflict and subject to unequal power
dynamics. The increasing reliance on households as sources of well-being may be exacer-
bating such conflict (Mosoetsa 2011). However, despite this conflict, households are the
central site through which workers’ livelihood strategies are carried out, as the data
below will demonstrate.
Conceptualising households in the broad sense that Smith and Wallerstein have pre-
sented is easy enough. A much more difficult task is accurately analysing the dynamics
of households on a large scale. There is a wide range of household survey data available,
but much of it suffers from limitations which are especially important to consider when ana-
lysing precarious workers’ households. One key issue is determining how to define a house-
hold member. A household survey that does not, for example, measure connections
between urban migrants and their rural homes will severely distort the actual picture of a
worker’s economic situation. This is particularly true for precarious workers, whose house-
holds and livelihood strategies often extend beyond a single residential location.
A second problem is measuring all sources of households’ income through a survey.
Households are complex sites of cooperation and conflict in which multiple types of
income are combined and/or produced. Smith and Wallerstein defined five types of
income which households utilise in order to gain a livelihood over time: wages, market
sales, rent, transfers and subsistence (1992, 7). The first four of these can be measured
with a fair degree of accuracy and reliability through detailed household surveys. Subsis-
tence income, by contrast, is very difficult to quantify, yet it is essential to the livelihoods
of almost all households. Subsistence income is especially important for precarious workers
since their other forms of income tend to be low.
This article combines two sources of data in order to analyse the households of precar-
ious workers in South Africa. First, it uses quantitative data from the National Income
Dynamics Study (NIDS), a data-gathering project by the Southern African Labour and
Development Research Unit (SALDRU) at the University of Cape Town. The NIDS is a
large-scale, nationally representative survey of 8040 households containing just over
32,000 residents. Although the NIDS is a panel survey, conducted bi-annually since
2008, the data used in this article come only from the most recent wave, conducted in
2012 (SALDRU 2013). The NIDS was specifically designed to address some of the short-
comings in existing household data. It uses a very broad definition of household, counting
anyone who lives in a common physical place at least 15 days out of the year as a household
member. The survey also includes a number of questions that collect information about
additional economic ties that may exist with individuals who are not counted as household
members. However, despite these advantages over previously existing household surveys,
the NIDS data do not allow an accurate assessment of subsistence income. In fact, given its
complexity, a comprehensive and generalisable measure of subsistence income would be
virtually impossible. In order to illustrate the way in which subsistence income shapes
the material interests of precarious workers, this article uses data from the author’s field
work among precarious workers in three rural sites in Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal
and from across multiple urban sites in the province of Gauteng. This field work, conducted
in 2010 and 2011, involved interviews and ethnographic observation focused on house-
holds’ economic situations with an emphasis on social connections and subsistence
incomes.
Review of African Political Economy 299
Conceptualising and operationalising precarious work
Despite, or perhaps because of, its ubiquity in contemporary debates, there is no broad con-
sensus on the definition of precarious work. Standing (2011) identifies precarious workers
as a distinct and growing class within the labour force who lack forms of security associated
with the traditional working class. By contrast, Franco Barchiesi, in his study of precarious-
ness in South Africa, notes that ‘the vulnerability and precariousness of employment . . . are
not confined to the lack of formal jobs . . . . Even many workers enjoying the protections of
unionisation earn wages that often barely cover basic necessities’ (2011, 75). Barchiesi’s
findings seem to confirm Ronaldo Munck’s scepticism of the usefulness of the concept
of precarious work, especially in the global South. Munck laments that ‘[t]here is little cog-
nisance [in the literature that] the type of work described by the term “precarity” has always
been the norm in the global South’ (2013, 752).
Indeed, Munck’s critique could be extended beyond the global South. In a sense, the
vast majority of workers in a capitalist system are in a precarious situation, in that they
depend on the labour market in order to gain all or part of their livelihood. It is this inherent
precarity that is the underlying reason for labour laws which provide workers protections
from the market by, for example, banning arbitrary dismissal, guaranteeing minimum
wage or working conditions etc. While we may debate the novelty of this situation, it is
undeniable that in contemporary global capitalism a significant portion of workers work
outside of these protections. This precaritisation of work has been driven by two converging
processes. On the one hand, employers have found ways to exclude previously protected
workers from the framework of labour protection offered by the law. This is what Jan
Theron has called ‘informalization from above’ (Theron 2010). At the same time there
has been an ongoing ‘informalization from below’ (Ibid.) driven by the masses of individ-
uals who are excess to the labour requirements of global capitalism and who are forced to
make their own work in order to survive. Even if we reject Standing’s argument that these
workers constitute a distinct class, we can ask how the precarious reality of work shapes the
politics of the contemporary labour force.
In the quantitative analysis presented in this article, precarious workers are divided into
two broad categories. The first category contains primarily workers who are the product of
informalisation (or precaritisation) from above. These are workers who have a regular wage
job, but one which lacks the full range of legal protections available to workers under South
African labour law. These workers can be further divided into two sub-categories. First are
those workers in jobs that should be covered by the law, but that, in actual practice, do not
meet the minimum legal requirements. This group of workers will be called unregulated
wage workers. In South Africa, these workers are both the largest group of precarious
workers and the most difficult to quantify, since their extra-legal work arrangements
cannot be easily measured through survey techniques. The NIDS survey does provide
some questions which make it possible to determine if the respondents’ conditions of
employment adhere to basic South African labour law. For example, the Basic Conditions
of Employment Act (BCEA) requires that all workers who work more than 24 hours per
week must be provided a written contract. Therefore, those workers who report that they
work more than 24 hours a week but do not have a contract can be understood to be
working in an unregulated job. Similarly, full-time employees must have contributions to
the national Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) deducted from their pay check. Those
that report that they do not have UIF deducted from their checks are in jobs that contravene
the BCEA.1 While it does seem likely that such small violations of labour law are a reason-
able proxy for the larger forms of insecurity that define precarious employment, these types
300 B. Scully
of questions are unlikely to capture the full range of unregulated wage work that exists in
South Africa. Therefore it should be expected that unregulated wage workers are under-
counted in the data presented below.
These unregulated workers are in jobs that operate outside the legal framework of South
African labour relations. There is another group of workers who have regular wage jobs
which do adhere to the law but still qualify as precarious because their employers use
legal means to circumvent some of the protections provided by the legal framework.
This category includes outsourced workers, workers who are employed on a fixed-term
contract and workers who are employed part time. For all of these part-time/contract
wage workers, various aspects of the law can be circumvented (Theron 2003). Most signifi-
cantly, they are easier to dismiss. In contrast to unregulated workers, the NIDS data should
provide a relatively accurate measurement of part-time/contract workers.
Both unregulated and part-time/contract workers have something that looks like a
regular wage job, even if it is insecure and/or of limited duration. The second broad cat-
egory of precarious workers, which mirrors Theron’s concept of informalisation from
below, consists of those workers who have no regular employment and instead rely on
low-income survivalist activities. As with regular wage jobs, workers in survivalist activi-
ties can be divided into two sub-categories. The first category includes individuals who rely
on self-employment. Of course, not all of the self-employed are in precarious work. For
example, successful business owners or wealthy consultants should not be grouped together
with street hawkers or individuals offering haircuts in their backyards. For this article, self-
employed individuals are only counted as precarious workers if they earn R3100 per month
(�$310) or less from their business.2
The second type of precarious workers who rely on survivalist activities are those indi-
viduals who work as casual workers, day labourers or pieceworkers. Of course, these
casual workers do earn wages. However, unlike the regular wage workers described
above, they do not have consistent and reliable access to wage income. This includes indi-
viduals who find day work on the roadside or by approaching work sites. It might also
include individuals who are occasionally hired by relatives or neighbours for specific
tasks, but on an inconsistent basis.
A final small group of workers who are counted as precarious are those who report in
the NIDS survey that their main economic activity is helping a family member with his or
her business. This type of work begins to blur into other types of unpaid household labour
(such as childcare and food preparation) which are not included here as forms of precarious
work. However, these individuals are included because their unpaid work is oriented
directly towards market activities.
There are three groups of workers who should be mentioned who are not counted as
precarious workers in the data below, one of which is omitted for conceptual reasons,
the other two owing to the limitations of the NIDS data. The first and largest group is
the unemployed. The unemployed share many material and political interests with precar-
ious workers and should be considered important to the overall politics of precarity.
However, the central argument of this article, that precarious workers rely primarily on
household-centred rather than workplace-centred livelihood strategies, is obvious in the
case of the unemployed. If the unemployed are considered alongside the precariously
employed workers who are the focus here, the arguments of the article can only be
strengthened.
The second group is excluded from the analysis below because of limitations of the
NIDS data. When the NIDS fieldwork was undertaken some household members were
not available to be interviewed, often because they were migrant workers who lived and
Review of African Political Economy 301
worked much of the year away from their ‘sending’ household. In these cases other house-
hold members were interviewed as proxies for the unavailable respondents. These proxy
interviews asked a simplified version of the full adult survey. The proxy questionnaire
does not make it possible to distinguish workers who are unregulated or part-time/contract
workers from ‘non-precarious’ wage workers. Since these proxy respondents are primarily
migrant workers they are probably more likely to be in precarious work than a randomly
selected worker. Yet, without further information this group of workers, who constitute
about 11% of all employed workers, cannot be reliably classified. They are described in
the charts and analysis below as unknown employed workers.
The final omitted precarious workers are the heterogeneous group of individuals who
work in what would be conceptually defined as precarious jobs, but which the data
provide no way of identifying. For example, individuals who had been subcontracted out
from their primary employer would not be captured as precarious if their contract was
full time and not of a limited duration. Other workers might be subjected to conditions
of employment that do not adhere to South African labour law, but if they had a written
contract and had UIF deducted from their check, they would not be identified as precarious.
Because of these limitations the group of precarious workers analysed below should be con-
sidered a conservative estimate of the overall population of South Africa’s precarious
workers. Although the terms ‘precarious workers’ and ‘non-precarious workers’ are used
below for the sake of convenience, it would be more accurate to think of the groups dis-
cussed as those whose job can or cannot be identified as precarious by the NIDS data.
Using the above methodology, 42% of South Africa’s employed labour force can be
identified as precarious.3 Of households that have an employed member, 48% contain a
worker who can be identified as precarious in the NIDS data. Considering the conservative
method of counting precarious workers used here, it is safe to assume that precarious
workers’ households are the modal households among the employed in SA. Figure 1 pre-
sents a breakdown of the employed labour force as a whole (left pie) and of precarious
workers by type of work (right pie). Just under two-thirds of precarious workers are in
regular wage work while the remaining workers engage in various forms of survivalist
market activities.
Precarious workers’ household livelihoods
Figure 1 shows the position of individual precarious workers in the labour market.
However, because it shows nothing about precarious workers’ households, it obscures
the full material reality of these workers’ economic lives. Table 1 shows the full range of
income sources on which precarious workers’ household rely. Precarious workers’ house-
holds are any household that contains at least one precarious worker. In the table, house-
holds are separated into three strata depending on their position in the per capita income
distribution. Income from work sources – including both wage work and self-employment
– is divided into two categories, depending on whether the work that provides them would
be classified as precarious or not. ‘Unknown work’ refers to the income earned by proxy
respondents in the NIDS survey whose work cannot be categorised.
The table shows that wages from precarious work provide less than half of total income
earned by all precarious workers in South Africa. For poorer precarious workers’ house-
holds, the percentage of income contributed by wages from precarious jobs is less than
40%. This is evidence of both the low levels of precarious incomes and the diversity of
income sources on which households rely. Even within precarious workers’ households,
wages from formal jobs can be important to the households’ overall livelihood. This is
302 B. Scully
reflected in the amount contributed by wages from ‘non-precarious’ work, but also by the
amount contributed by remittances. Remittances and non-precarious work combined con-
tribute over a quarter of total income to precarious workers’ households. While the structure
of the survey does not make it possible to determine the original source of remittance
income, it is safe to assume that a significant portion of remittance income is from non-pre-
carious sources since precarious incomes are often too low to allow for remittance sending.
Government grants are another vital source of income, especially for poorer precarious
workers’ households. Two programmes contribute the vast majority of these grants. The
first is the state grant for older persons, known as the pension grant. This is a means-
tested grant given to all South Africans over 60 who meet the means test.4 The second is
the child support grant, a means-tested grant given to the guardians of children under 18
years old. These grants form the backbone of the country’s social welfare system. In
2013 the South African Social Security Agency provided 15.6 million grants, including
the two mentioned and a range of smaller grants (SASSA 2013). This amounts to just
under one grant for every three residents of the country.
The next largest contribution to incomes is made by implied rent. Implied rent is an
imputed value that reflects the amount that a household saves by not having to pay rent
on its primary dwelling. Two categories of households ‘earn’ implied rent. First are
those households in which a resident member owns the home in which the household
resides. The second group is households who report that they neither own nor rent the
home. These individuals could be living in a home owned by a non-resident family
member or friend, or they could be ‘squatting’ or living in an informal dwelling on
which no rent is paid. Of course, implied rent is, strictly speaking, a form of savings
rather than a form of income. However, it is important to include here because this
Figure 1. South African precarious workers by type.
Source: author’s calculations from the 2012 NIDS data (SALDRU 2013).
Review of African Political Economy 303
savings is an essential source of livelihood, in some cases the most important source for
poorer households. The other income category combines a number of relatively small
income sources. For wealthier households it is mostly income from investments. For
poorer households it is mostly subsistence agriculture.
The presentation in Table 1 is useful for identifying overall trends. It clearly establishes
the fact that wages from precarious jobs are only one of many income sources on which
precarious workers’ households draw. However, because the table combines all income
earned by all households in each stratum, it masks the fact that there is great diversity
between households, even within a given income stratum. Individual households do not
necessarily draw from all of these income sources at any given time. Figure 2 presents a
better picture of the diverse types of households in which precarious workers live. In this
figure precarious workers are divided according to the income source that their household
relies on for the majority of its income. Thirty-eight per cent of precarious workers live in a
household in which their own wage is the primary household income source. The remaining
majority of precarious workers live in households in which an income source other than
their own wage provides the most of the households’ income.
Table 1. Percentage of household income provided by each income source to precarious workers’
households, by position in the per capita household income distribution (2012).
Source: author’s calculations from the 2012 NIDS data (SALDRU 2013).
Figure 2. What income source provides the majority of household income to precarious workers’
households?
Source: author’s calculations from the 2012 NIDS data (SALDRU 2013).
304 B. Scully
For 25% of precarious workers, non-wage sources (including government grants, remit-
tances and implied rent) provide most of the household’s income. About the same percen-
tage of precarious workers (22%) live in households in which the wages of other household
members provide most income. The remaining 15% of precarious workers live in house-
holds in which no single income source accounts for more than half of total household
income.
The data presented above demonstrate the degree to which precarious workers rely on
income sources beyond their own work in order to gain a livelihood. They show that the
material interests of precarious workers extend far beyond their own workplace. The
data show the central role that the household plays as a site in which income is pooled
from multiple sources. However, the income sources captured in the data presented here
do not account for the full complexity of South African households’ livelihood strategies.
Most precarious workers’ households are earning very low incomes. Even those households
on the 75th percentile of the income distribution earn less than R2000 (�$200) per capita
each month. The median per capita household income among precarious workers is about
R900 (�$90) per month. To get by on such low levels of income, these households depend
on support from social and kinship networks which cannot be as easily or reliably
measured, but which is nonetheless vital to the livelihoods of precarious workers. This
support is a form of what Smith and Wallerstein (1992) called subsistence income. The
next section turns to the role of this form of income in South African precarious
workers’ households.
Reading between the numbers: subsistence income and precarious workers’
livelihoods
Subsistence income is not only difficult to measure, it is also, as Smith and Wallerstein
recognised, the ‘most confusing’ form of income to conceptualise. It captures the reality
that ‘virtually every household produces some of what it requires to reproduce itself . . . ’
(Smith and Wallerstein 1992, 9, emphasis in original). Thinking about this self-produced
output as a form of income conveys the idea that it is another resource that individuals
and households utilise alongside wages, grants, rents and other monetary resources in
order to gain a livelihood. However, subsistence income is more accurately measured not
in monetary terms, but in terms of work. It is the outcome of the unpaid work that individ-
uals depend on for survival and reproduction.
Some forms of subsistence work, such as growing food for household consumption, can
be measured in monetary terms in the NIDS data. (These are mostly captured in the other
income category in the tables and figures above.) However, the most common forms of sub-
sistence work cannot be measured in the NIDS data. For example, the quotidian domestic
tasks – such as cleaning, preparing food and caring for children, the ill or the elderly – are
performed without compensation and are essential not only to South African precarious
workers, but to the livelihoods of virtually all individuals in capitalist economies. For pre-
carious households this unpaid domestic labour may be even more important than for weal-
thier households, given precarious workers’ low levels of other income.
However, subsistence labour is not only oriented towards immediate reproductive tasks.
Unpaid household labour also plays a vital role in securing long-term livelihoods of indi-
viduals and families. Securing some level of stability in post-work years is an enormous
challenge for precarious workers, many of whom struggle to get by even during their
working years. This long-term oriented subsistence labour is important for understanding
the economic lives of precarious workers.
Review of African Political Economy 305
One key to most individuals’ long-term livelihood plans is to have children who will
work and be able to offer some support to their parents. Raising children is therefore
both an everyday reproductive task but also a part of a family’s long-term economic
plans. The same applies to maintenance of a house or land which a family owns (or to
which it has a secure long-term claim, in the case of areas governed by customary law).
Having a house is one of the most important components of a household’s long-term liveli-
hood strategy. A place to live rent-free, especially in post-work years, provides a level of
security that is difficult for many precarious workers’ households to achieve. For those
families whose houses are situated in rural areas, often far from job opportunities, maintain-
ing a house often means having at least one adult family member who forgoes the oppor-
tunity to travel in search of wage work. In this sense, the mere presence of an individual at a
rural home over their working-age years can be thought of as a form of subsistence ‘labour’.
For both the everyday and the long-term varieties of subsistence labour, precarious
workers are usually key providers for their households. This responsibility shapes these
individuals’ roles and identities within families and households. Their precarious work is
often a part of that strategy but is rarely the primary activity, especially for long-term liveli-
hood strategies. This point is best illustrated by looking at an example of a South African
precarious worker’s household, members of which were interviewed in my field work in
Mpumalanga province.
The primary respondent in this household is a married woman in her mid forties. She
lives on the same property as her elderly mother-in-law, her children, her sister-in-law
and her nephews. Her husband and his younger brother are also members of this household.
Although they work most of the year in Johannesburg, they return to the home every
December. The husband and brother-in-law work as wage labourers in the construction
industry (in jobs that would be classified above as precarious) and also do independent con-
struction work on their own. At the rural home the wife and sister-in-law take care of the
children and the ailing mother-in-law, who receives a government pension grant. They
also run a small shop out of their home which sells frozen fish to neighbours. In addition
to attending school, the children take care of the animals and older ones help their father
add buildings to their property when he is home for a few weeks each year. The property
consists of two finished buildings and a number of buildings under construction, some of
which are being used as dwellings while they are under construction.
Although this family has a low income, they have a more stable long-term livelihood
strategy than the majority of their peers in their rural community. Being married, the
couple will have access to two old-age pensions in their retirement. They also have a
small but stable business, selling fish, which will supplement this income. They have
animals which act as a safety-net store of wealth. Most importantly, they have a home
that they live in rent-free, which saves them one of the major expenses most families
face in retirement. If some of their children are able to find jobs that allow them to send
occasional remittances, this couple could expect to be one of the more secure retired
couples in their community after they finished work.
In a survey like the NIDS, the wife in this family would be counted as a self-employed
precarious worker. However, her role in securing the family’s long-term livelihood extends
beyond the work she does selling fish from the home. Her most important subsistence con-
tribution is the fact that by living at and maintaining the rural home she allows the family to
continue their claim on the homestead. This role as the caretaker of the home is much more
important to the long-term security of the family than is her income from her work, or any
other precarious work income that she might be able to earn. She would not, for example,
leave her home to take a precarious job in another location if there was not someone else to
306 B. Scully
maintain the rural house. Income from precarious work is both insufficient and unreliable. It
cannot be counted on to provide enough to secure housing for her family in retirement.
This might seem like an obvious insight. However, these details of precarious workers’
actual lives and experiences are often ignored in debates about ‘organising’ such workers.
Both the wife and the husband in this household are precarious workers, one self-employed
(the wife) and one a casual or unregulated worker (the husband). However it is only when
we look beyond these workers’ experiences of precarious work, situating their paid labour
in the larger context of their household livelihood strategy, that we see the broad range of
issues which affect their material interests. For these workers, access to land (primarily for
housing) and access to pensions are as, if not more, important to their long-term well-being
as are the precarious incomes they earn daily as a fish seller and a construction worker.
This importance of subsistence income to household livelihood strategies is not unique
to the most marginalised sections of the precarious working class. Even for urban workers
who have regular wage employment, social and kinship networks remain essential to long-
term livelihood strategies. This is exemplified by another household from my fieldwork in
Gauteng province. The primary respondent from this household is an unmarried man who
works at a food-processing factory on the East Rand near Johannesburg. This man is a
member of a union, but works in a subcontracted position. Like the rural household
described above, unpaid household labour plays a major role in this man’s long-term liveli-
hood strategy. The man lives near his mother and aunt (who share a house), as well as his
brother, who is a unionised metalworker. The mother and aunt own their house and plot.
Since neither of the sons owns a house, the mother’s home is central to their long-term live-
lihood strategies. The sons are using their savings to build a snack bar at their mother and
aunt’s house. Their plan is for the food worker son to eventually quit his job and run the
snack bar full time. The other brother will join him when he reaches retirement age.
In contrast to the rural family from Mpumalanga, this household’s long-term economic
plan is much less developed. They have started to build the space that will be made into a
snack bar, but it is not yet an established business and might not ever realistically be able to
provide a living for the family. Yet it is still telling that, in describing his long-term econ-
omic strategy, this respondent focused on income generated with household labour rather
than his wage work. He and his brother’s energies and hopes are invested in his
mother’s home and his relationships to his family members. It is these kinship networks
that both brothers see as the key factor in their long-term livelihood strategies. This exem-
plifies the importance of household-based livelihood strategies to South African workers’
own conceptions of their material interests.
Although it is difficult to make the leap directly from these practical understandings of
livelihood strategies to workers’ political identities, it seems clear that there is a connection.
An anecdote from a third interview subject illustrates the way in which precarious workers’
own identities often contrast with the ways in which labour scholars and unionists think
about them. In rural Mpumalanga one interview respondent was a man in his 60s who
lives in a house with his wife and grandson. The grandson, whose mother lives and
works elsewhere, is a successful student in middle school and plans on seeking a scholar-
ship to attend university. In the course of the interview the man was asked if he had a job
and he said no. He answered that he took care of his grandchild and that he and his wife
produced and sold small crafts like straw hats, ropes and grass mats. After a series of ques-
tions about household income, without uncovering any income sources beyond the crafts,
which produced minimal profit, he was simply asked, where do you get money to live?
After having earlier said he did not have a job, he now responded that he worked as a secur-
ity guard at a local school. When asked how long he had been doing this, he answered 14
Review of African Political Economy 307
years! When I expressed surprise that he had said he didn’t have a job despite working in the
same place for 14 years, he explained that it was not a real job, just an extra source of
income.
On the surface, it is puzzling that this man, who would be identified in the NIDS data as
a precarious worker with regular wage employment, puts such a low priority on his long-
held wage work that he doesn’t even describe it as a job. Instead he identifies primarily as a
husband, grandfather, craft maker and household head. However, when the long-term live-
lihood of the man and his household is considered, this identification makes more sense. If
the school-age child he is raising were to grow up and attend university, the remittances he
would be able to send would dwarf any increase in wages the man could earn by making
demands on the rural school that employs him as a security guard. Raising this child, and
maintaining a relationship with his employed mother, is this man and his household’s best
chance at achieving any level of long-term security. (Although that is not to suggest that he
thought of his familial relationships so instrumentally.)
These households show the aspects of precarious workers’ social and economic lives
that are not captured in survey data such as the NIDS. Particularly, they highlight the impor-
tance of subsistence work, which includes everyday unpaid domestic tasks but also extends
to efforts to secure long-term livelihood. Like the NIDS data, these households illustrate the
diversity of strategies that precarious workers employ to gain a livelihood. This diversity
must be taken into account in debates about the way in which shifting experiences of
work are shifting the politics of workers. In light of the findings presented here, the next
section returns to the question that opened the article: what do the economic lives of
South Africa’s precarious workers reveal about a politics of precarity?
Conclusion: the emerging politics of precarity
It is difficult to decipher, in the South African case, a broadly shared unifying experience of
precarious work. Precarious workers work in a wide variety of sites and under a diversity of
conditions. What defines the economic lives of precarious workers is not the experience of
work but the experience of insecurity. For a significant portion of precarious workers, the
income they earn from their work is insufficient to provide for even the immediate needs of
themselves and their families. For those who are able to gain a living through their work,
the volatility of their income means that they cannot rely on their precarious work as a long-
term livelihood strategy. As a result of this insecurity, precarious workers develop liveli-
hood strategies that combine multiple sources of income. These livelihood strategies are
usually centred on the household and draw heavily on the unpaid labour and social
support of the workers and their kin. This broadly diversified household-centred livelihood
is the central ‘common experience’ of precarious work. While the traditional politics of
labour arises from the workplace – the key site of production – the politics of precarity
arises from the home – the key site of reproduction.
This orientation towards the home shapes the way in which precarious workers formu-
late their identities and conceptualise their interests. Issues of work are neither unimportant
nor irrelevant to precarious workers. Income from precarious work is valuable, but it cannot
be relied upon in the long term. When workers think about their long-term strategies they
tend to see their economic life away from work as the essential factor. In their identities they
therefore tend to give priority to the roles that they hold within their households rather than
their roles within the workplace or the labour market.
Of course, the household-oriented identities of precarious workers are not immutable.
Social movements have, throughout history, often succeeded in changing the political
308 B. Scully
identities of large portions of societies. The modern labour movement from the late nineteenth
century through the middle of the twentieth century provides an example of one such success.
However, the failure of contemporary labour organisations to incorporate precarious workers
on a large scale over the past few decades demonstrates that building a political movement of
precarious workers around issues of work faces serious obstacles. The data presented in this
article suggest that if labour movement revitalisation is to be achieved, it will not be led by
workplace-centred unions mobilising workers around the issues of traditional labour politics.
However, this does not mean that existing labour unions are inevitably destined to ‘run
behind the new society’. The South African labour movement provides some innovative
recent examples of existing unions which have begun to shift their attention towards the poli-
tics of precarity. South African unions have been at the forefront of struggles in the country
around economic issues beyond the workplace, such as healthcare, transportation and land.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the country’s leading labour fed-
eration, has been a key political supporter of the government’s planned National Health Insur-
ance (NHI) scheme, arguing that ‘the case for NHI is overwhelming’ (COSATU 2011). This
support is noteworthy because, while some COSATU affiliate members (such as nurses and
doctors) would benefit from increased expenditure on public health care, on the whole it is
likely that the NHI would be a net transfer from COSATU members to the poorer majority
of South Africans. Similarly, the union federation has been a leader in the fight against
tolling of roads in Gauteng, the country’s most populous province. The union has invested
a great deal of its energy into this issue, which is not an issue of workers in the workplace
but of individuals dealing with commodification in the realm of daily life. Another example
of unions taking up pressing issues beyond the workplace comes from two of the country’s
more innovative unions, the Food and Allied Workers Union and the National Union of Metal-
workers of South Africa (NUMSA). These two unions have launched an ongoing campaign
about ‘agrarian transformation and land redistribution in South Africa’ (Numsa 2013). It is
striking that NUMSA, which represents some of the country’s most solidly industrial and
urbanised wage workers, would take up the issue of land. Of course, the degree to which
initiatives such as NUMSA’s and the others mentioned have any meaningful organisational
connection to precarious workers has been widely questioned. However, these shifts from
‘shop floor’ to ‘kitchen table’ issues among existing trade unions seem to offer confirmation
that there is an ongoing shift from a traditional politics of a labour to an emergent, livelihood-
centred politics of precarity.
Acknowledgements
The research presented in this article was conducted while I was a PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins
University in Baltimore, USA. I am grateful for the guidance and support I received from both faculty
and students in the Department of Sociology there, especially Beverly Silver. I was offered valuable
feedback on earlier versions of this article from Marcel Paret, Jackie Cock and Bridget Kenny, as well
as by two anonymous reviewers.
Note on contributor
Ben Scully is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand in
Johannesburg, South Africa. His research focuses on labour, livelihoods, social protection and devel-
opment policy, with a focus on southern Africa.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Review of African Political Economy 309
Notes
1. There are a few exceptions to the BCEA requirement for UIF deduction. The most problematic
group from a methodological perspective is public sector workers. There is no easy way to ident-
ify public sector workers in the NIDS data. In order to not count public sector workers who do not
have UIF deducted as precarious, two additional questions were used. To be counted as precar-
ious, a worker had to also report that they did not have deductions for a pension/provident fund
nor a medical aid in addition to not having UIF deducted.
2. In the NIDS data the mean income that employed people earn from their main job (whether it is
wage work or self-employment) is R3144 per month. The median income of employed respon-
dents is R1550. Although R3100 is twice the median income, it is not sufficient to provide the
security and stability normally associated with formal or ‘non-precarious’ work. While R3100
makes sense conceptually as a cut-off, given it is near the mean income of employed workers,
that specific number was dictated by the structure of the data. In the proxy surveys of the
NIDS, self-employed income is recorded in income bands, rather than as specific numbers.
R3100 is the cut-off point of one of the bands.
3. This and all other calculations in the article use the post-stratified weights provided in the NIDS
data which weight the sample to the characteristics of the South African population as a whole.
4. There has been a proposal by the Treasury to eliminate the means test in 2016, making the old-age
pension South Africa’s first universal grant.
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From politics of labour to a politics of precarity
Precarious households: the hidden abode of reproduction
Conceptualising and operationalising precarious work
Precarious workers’ household livelihoods
Reading between the numbers: subsistence income and precarious workers’ livelihoods
Conclusion: the emerging politics of precarity
Acknowledgements
Note on contributor
Disclosure statement
Notes
References
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