Retail Worker Politics, Race and Consumption in South Africa (eBook)

Shelved in the Service Economy

Bridget Kenny (Autor)

eBook Download: PDF

2018 | 1st ed. 2018
XV, 282 Seiten
Springer International Publishing (Verlag)
978-3-319-69551-8 (ISBN)

Infos

This book argues that we need to focus attention on the ways that workers themselves have invested subjectively in what it means to be a worker. By doing so, we gain an explanation that moves us beyond the economic decisions made by actors, the institutional constraints faced by trade unions, or the power of the state to interpellate subjects. These more common explanations make workers and their politics visible only as a symptom of external conditions, a response to deregulated markets or a product of state recognition. Instead - through a history of retailing as a site of nation and belonging, changing legal regimes, and articulations of race, class and gender in the constitution of political subjects from the 1930s to present-day Wal-Mart - this book presents the experiences and subjectivities of workers themselves to show that the collective political subject 'workers' (abasebenzi) is both a durable and malleable political category. From white to black women's labour, the forms of precariousness have changed within retailing in South Africa. Workers' struggles in different times have in turn resolved some dilemmas and by other turn generated new categories and conditions of precariousness, all the while explaining enduring attachments to labour politics.

Bridget Kenny is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. She works on labour, gender and consumption with a specific focus on service work, precarious employment, and political subjectivity.

Inhalt

Chapter 1. Introduction: Precarity in Store “Two for the Price of One”: The Inadequacies of Instrumentalism Servicing South Africa: Retail Spaces as Nation Law and the Category of “Employee” “Subjects-in-Struggle”: The Political Subjectivity of Retail Workers Chapter 2. Servicing a Nation: White Women Shop Assistants and the Fantasy of Belonging Retail Capital, the City and White Belonging White Women’s Service Labour Skill and Status Rules and Respectability Retail Expansion, Deskilling and Racial Reorganization The Necessary “Familiarity” of White Women’s Labour Chapter 3. Rupturing Relations: Abasebenzi as Collective Political Subject Black Women’s Service Work: Discriminatory Conditions and Racist Relations Refusing Erasure, Rupturing the Logic of Relations: Abasebenzi Emerge CCAWUSA and Collective Labour Politics Chapter 4. Regulating Retail: The Category “Employee” and its Divisions Subjects of Employment Law: “Employee” and “Labourer” Part-time Employment: From Responsible Motherhood to Monstrous Deprivation Casual Employment: Student Labour, Extra Help and Scabs Chapter 5. Signifying Belonging: Restructuring and Workplace Relations The Hypers: Revolutionizing Modern Retailing, 1975 to the 1990s A “Culture of Threat”: Changing Workplace Relations from the late 1990s A Disordered Present: The Past “Moral Economy” of the Workplace Subjectification of Workers: Outsider, Criminal, Labourer Chapter 6. “Tools Down, Everybody out to the Canteen!”: Wildcats and Go-slows, Political Subjects Reconfigured “We are Grown-Ups”: Permanent Workers as Adult Decision-makers “I must Make a Sale”: Contract Workers as Skilled Men “[We] Bring more Money”: Casual Workers as Exploited Labour Joint Actions: Race and Rights Chapter 7. “To Sit at Home and Do Nothing”: Gender and the Constitutive Meaning of Work “Sitting”: Statis as Social Death The Praxis of Providing Gendered Anxieties: Working for Children, Working for the Future Chapter 8. Consuming Politics: Wal-Mart, the New Terrain of Belonging and the Endurance of Abasebenzi The Market as Nation Labour Broking and Bulk Labour Supply The Law and Political Subject Abasebenzi Conclusion: Enduring Retail Worker Politics

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 23.5.2018
• Reihe/Serie: Rethinking International Development series
• Reihe/Serie: Rethinking International Development series
• Zusatzinfo: XV, 282 p. 15 illus., 3 illus. in color.
• Verlagsort: Cham
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Recht / Steuern ► Arbeits- / Sozialrecht ► Arbeitsrecht
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Staat / Verwaltung
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Vergleichende Politikwissenschaften
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft
• Schlagworte: Abasebenzi • Citizenship • Collective Action • Johannesburg • Labour • Labour broking • labour law • Politics and International Relations • Precarious labour • Racism • Retail • Retail FDI • Self-Service • South Africa • Trade • Wal-Mart • Wild-cat strike • women's rights • Work contracts
• ISBN-10: 3-319-69551-7 / 3319695517
• ISBN-13: 978-3-319-69551-8 / 9783319695518