Authors:
- Gives flesh to precarious women service workers’ subjectivities
- Follows workers' struggles from white to black women's labour
- Contextualizes debates around employment, inequality, poverty alleviation and labour politics from the perspective of a developing economy
Part of the book series: Rethinking International Development series (RID)
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
About this book
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.
Reviews
“Retail Worker Politics, Race and Consumption in South Africa offers searing insight into the contested world of retail work and labour politics over the past century in South Africa. Drawing upon twenty years of ethnographic engagement, Bridget Kenny shows how retail sector workers’ struggles for rights and dignity in the workplace have decisively shaped the terrain of political belonging in South Africa, despite sweeping transformations in the racial composition of the workforce, the contractual nature of work and employment, and the global organisation of the retail industry.” (Jennifer Jihye Chun, University of California Los Angeles, US)
Authors and Affiliations
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Department of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
Bridget Kenny
About the author
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.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Retail Worker Politics, Race and Consumption in South Africa
Book Subtitle: Shelved in the Service Economy
Authors: Bridget Kenny
Series Title: Rethinking International Development series
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69551-8
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Political Science and International Studies, Political Science and International Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-69550-1Published: 06 June 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-09895-7Published: 26 January 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-69551-8Published: 23 May 2018
Series ISSN: 2946-2231
Series E-ISSN: 2946-224X
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XV, 282
Number of Illustrations: 12 b/w illustrations, 3 illustrations in colour
Topics: Development Studies, Political Science, Citizenship, African Economics, Labour Law/Social Law