Social citizenship and the transformations of wage labour in the making of Post-Apartheid South Africa, 1994-2001

Faculty of Humanities and social sciences School of social sciences 8508612p [email protected] work is an investigation of the relationships between waged labour and social citizenship during the first decade of post-apartheid democracy in South Africa. In particular, I look at the ways in which changing forms of work and employment have affected workers' access to social security, contributory benefits and non-contributory grants. The dissertation analyses two case studies (workers in the glass, paper and metal industry in the East Rand and Johannesburg municipal employees) by focusing on how rising unemployment, job losses, precariousness and casualisation impact on employees' social provisions. The research is connected to theoretical debates that, in the developed and the developing world, have emphasised the importance of the waged condition and of labour movements in expanding social security as part of the broader concept of social citizenship. In classical theorisations, from T.H. Marshall to G. Esping-Andersen, social citizenship defines a generation of rights premised on decommodification, or the provision of social goods (including pensions, unemployment benefits, housing, healthcare and municipal services) as entitlements aimed at minimising individual dependence on the labour market. The concept of decommodification underpins this dissertation. My analysis of the relationships between wage labour and social citizenship in South Africa is ultimately an inquiry of the ways in which wage labour and working class organisations have been able to deepen and widen the decommodification of workers’ livelihoods. This conceptual perspective is particularly relevant to the South African case, especially in consideration of the decisive role played by organised labour both in contributing to the downfall of apartheid and in spearheading post-apartheid democratic institutions and progressive social policies. The historical role of organised labour in the South African transition was not confined to workplace issues and unionised workers' concerns, but it also emphasised broader demands for social citizenship rights, decommodified provisions and a politics of community-based alliances. Influential scholarly works have often characterised these aspects under the heading of "social movement unionism". In a post-apartheid scenario, social movement unionism is increasingly embattled due to rising unemployment and "atypical" employment, and to the adoption of market-orientated socioeconomic policies by the post-1994 African National Congress government. Labour's ability to promote agendas for decommodification and social citizenship are concurrently facing uncomfortable realities and problematic questions. Has wage labour fulfilled its "promise" to be a vehicle to expand the social rights of the working class and the poor? In which ways are employment and labour market changes affecting organised labour's ability to expand areas of societal decommodification? Are alternative identities and social citizenship discourses emerging in response to the crisis of stable employment? I address these questions by looking at workers' responses to the crisis of wage labour as emerging in case studies “from below”, and at the ways in which such responses are framed and elaborated within the post-1994 social policy discourse. A second component of my research, therefore, is based on interviews with policy-makers and documentary analysis on the development of social policy from 1994 to 2001, which emphasise shifting policy discourses on the wage laboursocial citizenship interaction. In the final analysis, social citizenship emerges from this work not merely as a static construct, centred on programmes and institutions, but as a terrain of negotiations and a "contested field of signification", shaped by the encounter of institutional narratives and meanings defined by grassroots agency. The result of the research confirms that concepts of "social citizenship" and "wage labour" are profoundly shaped by contradictions determined by underlying social contestation. In fact, respondents in my case studies clearly perceive the crisis of stable, dignified employment as a structural reality that requires systemic policy interventions. On the other hand, no homogenous discourse is emerging in workers’ narratives to challenge deeply entrenched views of inclusion and the social order as based on waged employment. Decommodification discourses, as for example advanced by new social movements, remain therefore substantially limited. Conversely, the policy discourse of democratic South Africa responds to the crisis, when not the actual disappearance, of wage labour as a social reality with an aggressive reassertion of work ethic and wage discipline as vehicles of social insertion and moral virtue. The ANC government often combines these arguments with a clear rejecton of decommodification, often presented as "dependency" on welfare "handouts", which undermines individual incentives for productive jobseeking behaviours. The contradictions between the crisis of wage labour in social practices and modes of reproduction, and the reasserted centrality of wage labour in the policy discourse as the main modality of social citizenship and inclusion opens new directions for research and interrogates changing forms of social identities, contestation and political legitimacy in the South African transition

Commercialisation of waste management in South Africa

The collection of household refuse – or the lack thereof – is one of the most powerful visual benchmarks of inequality in South Africa. Although the situation has improved somewhat since 1994, formerly whites-only suburbs are still kept immaculately clean with regular door-to-door refuse collection and teams of street sweepers, while most black township and rural area residents are forced to dump their refuse in open spaces or in unsealed communal skips. Street cleaning is often non-existent, and where it is available workers are often unable to cope with the volume of uncollected waste. As a visual indicator of change, solid waste management acts as a daily reminder to millions of poor South Africans that their health, safety, and living environments have changed very little in the past seven years. Municipal governments in South Africa have been turning increasingly to commercialisation (i.e., privatisation, outsourcing, corporatisation) as a way of addressing this refuse collection backlog. Why this has happened, and how successful it has been at addressing the problem, are the subjects of the two papers in this collection. The first paper looks at a micro-enterprise refuse collection programme in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, known as the Billy Hattingh scheme. The second looks at the newly-corporatised refuse collection service in Johannesburg called “Pikitup”. Although very different in their institutional make-up and size, these two initiatives are both driven by the same commercialisation impulse that is reshaping the waste management sector throughout South Africa. The papers also offer remarkably similar insights into the dangers of running waste management ‘like a business’. This introduction provides a summary of the findings of these two research reports and groups them into four themes: concerns about the entrenchment of a two-tiered refuse collection system; a lack of proper public consultation in the commercialisation process; the loss of public sector skills; and the impact of service restructuring on municipal workers

Fungicidal activity and PK/PD of caspofungin as tools to guide antifungal therapy in a fluconazole-resistant C. parapsilosis candidemia

Candida parapsilosis may be responsible for bloodstream infections (BSI) and it is characterised by an increased incidence of fluconazole resistance. A 75-year old woman with severe comorbidities received the insertion of a peripherally inserted central venous catheter. Fluconazole did not prevent a C. parapsilosis BSI hence caspofungin was started after a nephrotoxic first-line treatment with amphotericin B. The ratio of peak plasma concentration over the minimum inhibitory concentration (Cmax/MIC) was adopted to maximise efficacy of caspofungin. MIC and plasma Cmax values were obtained by broth microdilution and LC-MS, respectively. Interestingly, daily doses of 1 mg/kg (total daily dose, 50 mg) allowed the achievement of Cmax/MIC values > 10. The optimised regimen was safe and effective, leading to negative blood culture at day 8. The patient was discharged home at day 21. Therefore, individualised dosing regimens of caspofungin may be effective and safe even in the case of C. parapsilosis BSI

Transformative sensemaking: Development in Whose Image? Keyan Tomaselli and the semiotics of visual representation

The defining and distinguishing feature of homo sapiens is its ability to make sense of the world, i.e. to use its intellect to understand and change both itself and the world of which it is an integral part. It is against this backdrop that this essay reviews Tomaselli's 1996 text, Appropriating Images: The Semiotics of Visual Representation/ by summarizing his key perspectives, clarifying his major operational concepts and citing particular portions from his work in support of specific perspectives on sense-making. Subsequently, this essay employs his techniques of sense-making to interrogate the notion of "development". This exercise examines and confirms two interrelated hypotheses: first, a semiotic analysis of the privileged notion of "development" demonstrates its metaphysical/ ideological, and thus limiting, nature especially vis-a-vis the marginalized, excluded, and the collective other, the so-called Developing Countries. Second, the interrogative nature of semiotics allows for an alternative reading and application of human potential or skills in the quest of a more humane social and global order, highlighting thereby the transformative implications of a reflexive epistemology.Web of Scienc

The global subject of precarity

Peer reviewedPostprin

Without the blanket of the land: agrarian change and biopolitics in post–Apartheid South Africa

This paper connects Marxist approaches to the agrarian political economy of South Africa with post-Marshallian and Foucauldian analyses of distributional regimes and late capitalist governmentality. Looking at South Africa’s stalled agrarian transition through the lens of biopolitics as well as class analysis can make visible otherwise disregarded connections between processes of agrarian change and broader contests about the terms of social and economic incorporation into the South African social and political order before, during and after Apartheid. This can bring a fresh sense of the broader political implications of the course of agrarian change in South Africa, and helps contextualise the enduring salience of land as a flashpoint within South Africa’s unresolved democratic transition

Flexibility and changes in forms of workplace subjectivity: a case study of the South African automobile assembly industry

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Sociology. Johannesburg, 1997.This thesis is an investigation into worker responses to restructuring of work and production organisation in a South African automobile manufacturing company. The orgnnisation of work and production is analysed as part of managerial strategies aimed at promoting flexibility Worker responses will be conceptualized in a general model of worker subjectivity. Subjectivity here means the process through which workers make sense of changes in factory life according to regulative ideas and general moral and cultural constructions of the meanings of industrial work. I adopted a method based on observational research and semi-structured interviews with a group of workers, integrated by archival research and interviews with managers and union organisers, The results of my enquiry confirm hypotheses and theoretical frameworks critical towards the notion of flexibility as representing a clear divide with traditional "mass production" methods. In fact, managerial promotion of flexibility coexists here with relevant continuities in hierarchical and authoritarian structures, paternalism, lack of skills' recognition, use of technology as a mainly cost-cutting device, routinisation and lack of worker responsibility and independence. [Abbreviated Abstract. Open document to view full version