Labour, capital and society 

About: Labour, capital and society is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Labour law & Gold mining. Over the lifetime, 93 publications have been published receiving 604 citations.

COSATU, the SACP and the ANC post-Polokwane: looking left but does it feel right?

Abstract: Key organisations of the working class, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP), have in recent years offered vigorous support to the tainted former Deputy President of South Africa, Jacob Zuma. At the momentous December 2007 national congress of the African National Congress (ANC) in Polokwane, this support saw Zuma catapulted into the presidency of the ruling party, alongside key former unionists and SACP members Gwede Mantashe (General Secretary) and Kgalema Motlanthe (Deputy President). By September 2008 they succeeded in ousting Thabo Mbeki as president of the country, installing Motlanthe as caretaker president until the 2009 elections, when Zuma is expected to take over. This led to a split in the ANC, with key Mbeki supporters moving on to form the Congress of the People (COPE), what some characterize as a 'rightwing' split. Has the SACPCOSATU-ANC Alliance 'Left' succeeded in using Zuma to capture the ANC in pursuit of a more redistributive, participatorydemocratic trajectory; or has it badly miscalculated by throwing its weight behind a Zuma coalition that in fact is dominated by predatory class interests? Or does Polokwane represent something even more ominous the rise, under the guise of 'leftwing' working class politics, of an intolerant neo-Stalinist populist politics? Introduction The rise of the Zuma coalition after the ANC national executive committee elections in Polokwane during December 2007 has been heralded by some as a dramatic shift to the left, given the support of key working class formations, the SACP and COSATU. Masterfully engineered from behind the scenes by forces led by SACP general secretary Blade Nzimande, in concert with COSATU general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi, the view is that at last the rightwing '1996 class project' has been derailed, 6 and after the 2009 elections the ANC-in-government will place the working class much more decisively at the top of its agenda. Sympathetic observers have detected a renewed emphasis on redistributive politics, and a greater determination to move away from the neo-liberal temptations of the past. This is evident in the ANC's 2007 national conference resolutions (ANC, 2007) as well as its 2009 election manifesto (ANC, 2009). This, of course, is an optimistic reading of what has been happening in the triple Alliance. A pessimistic account would place patronage politics more at the centre of new developments. Critics argue that the key organs of working class power, the SACP and COSATU, have a compromised leadership that has tied the working class into a symbiotic relationship with the ruling party. Both the membership of COSATU and its leadership are relative insiders i.e. beneficiaries of the post-apartheid order vis a vis the unemployed, the informalized and the working poor majority who remain unorganized. Unless it, and the SACP, take the interests of the unorganized seriously, its intention to \"swell the ranks\" of the ANC (COSATU, 2003b), and return it to its alleged 'working class bias', is an empty promise. The ANC is controlled by bourgeois-nationalist class interests who are adept at using the working class to consolidate their power. The MbekiZuma split, according to this view, is not one over ideology, but primarily a fight over the spoils of 'national liberation', which were until 2007 controlled by those class interests that coalesced around Mbeki. Instead of empowering the working class (broadly defined), the SACP and COSATU are colluding with hitherto marginalized black business interests (or nascent business interests) within the Zuma coalition, who are only interested in claiming their share of the spoils of state power. At best, say pessimists, this is a 'hope and pray' strategy, where the SACP and COSATU hope to out-manoeuvre the nascent, predatory bourgeoisie within the Zuma alliance, and hegemonize a working class interest in the ANC and new government elected in 2009. At worst the COSATU/SACP leadership are actively using the working class to promote the interests of a hitherto marginalized black business class (whose ranks they allegedly want to join, as their predecessors did). In either case the essentially neoliberal Mbeki project will remain intact, but with different actors at the helm, albeit articulating a more redistributive developmental discourse.

The labour of liminality

Abstract: The formal day-labour business is a well-entrenched, multibillion dollar industry that exemplifies the two most consequential changes in contemporary employment relations: the growth of precarious employment and the increased role of labour market intermediaries. It is an industry premised upon the temporal expropriation and spatial retention of a surplus pool of labouron-demand. Drawing upon extensive interviews and nearly three years of participant observation working as a day labourer amidst a predominantly homeless, and formerly-incarcerated, AfricanAmerican workforce in the inner-cities of Oakland and Baltimore, this paper identifies the multifarious functions and broad implications of day labourers’ routinized experience of chronic and obligatory waiting. I argue that this liminal period serves as an instrument of inspection, as an instrument of immobilization and as an instrument to intensify labourer’s investment in the uncertain pursuit of work. This analysis enables us to better understand not only the distinct operations of the day labour business, but precisely how labour is subjugated, dependency is cultivated and precarious and degraded conditions of employment are normalized for those at the bottom of the U.S. labour market. Introduction “I’m losing it,” Troy mutters, looking at me out of the corners of his blood-shot eyes as we sit stiff-legged and side-by-side in the crowded, unkempt dispatch hall of InstaLabour, one of the leading U.S. commercial day labour agencies and principal brokers in the low-wage labour market.2 “I hate comin’ down to this place,” he continues. “I’m about ready to snap.” Troy has been working for InstaLabour for over six months. This morning, he arrived well before the doors opened at 5:30am, determined to be near the top of the always-contested “list.” Nearly three hours later, he now wrings his calloused hands and nods to a TV that hangs from a low ceiling, blaring an endless, pacifying stream of morning news programs that will soon morph into daytime talk shows. “And I hate watching TV 12 all day. I don’t hate it at night, ya’ know, after a long day of work, but this? This just makes the day go by so slow, just sittin’ around, vegetating, hoping the whole time that you’re gonna go out.” Troy stares at a man standing in front of us wearing cheap, plastic headphones (curiously unattached to any musical device, the cord hanging loosely to his knees) and using an industrial-sized broom to sweep up the thin, blue carpet, littered with bits of paper and stray cigarette butts and stained by untold numbers of early-morning coffee spills. “And on top of that, we gotta deal with shit like this all day long.” His frustration, anxiety and sense of social worthlessness mounting, Troy mutters, “I gotta get out of this hell hole. I feel like I’m going backwards.” After a few moments pause, he concludes, “We might as well be in a damn rest home.” The day labour, or “on demand staffing,” business is the bottom-rung, or “low road,” of the broad, burgeoning, and highly diversified temporary staffing industry, a well-entrenched industry that exemplifies the two most consequential changes in contemporary employment relations: the growth of contingent work and the increased role of labour market intermediaries (Barker and Christensen, 1998; Benner, Leete and Pastor, 2007; Kalleberg, 2009; Osterman, 1999; Osterman, 2003; Smith, 2001a). Whereas the former has contributed to the widespread uncertainty and unpredictability of employment, the latter has contributed to an increased structural and regulatory ambiguity of employment relationships. As Gottfried (1992: 447) notes, these changes have fundamentally altered “standard assumptions about temporality and spatiality in the organization of capitalist production,” resulting in an ever-increasing number of workers struggling to navigate the temporal turbulence and spatial splintering of employment. For Troy and countless other day labourers relegated to working both through and for what are colloquially termed “labour pools” or, more disparagingly, “body shops,” this means a daily, pre-dawn routine that consists of waiting, waiting without pay, waiting for an indeterminate length of time, and waiting without ever knowing if the wait will be worth the while, all in the hopes of securing a day’s work, what Peck and Theodore (2001: 493) insightfully call “fractions of jobs” and what Snow and Anderson (1993: 123) aptly refer to as “jobs without a tomorrow.” Drawing upon the work of Victor Turner (1967), I refer to this routine as a labour of liminality. In so doing, I take up Sweeney’s

'Retail renaissance' or company rhetoric: the failed partnership of a South African corporation and local suppliers in Zambia

Abstract: When South Africa had its democratic transition in 1994, one unanticipated consequence of this new moment in the region was the renewed expansion of South African multinationals into other African countries. One such company was the South African retail chain, Shoprite. Their ‘Cape to Cairo’ expansion opened up new kinds of regional contradictions, evoking new expectations for the economic benefits South African companies could generate for the region, as well as new sites of conflict and cooperation. This article provides an account of how a community of farmers in the Eastern Province of Zambia threatened to resist the South African retail expansion. Averting trouble, the company and these villagers entered into a participatory arrangement to supply vegetables to the company. This small economic victory for the farmers attests to the political vulnerability of South African companies engaged in a post-Apartheid regional expansion. This article examines regional aspects of the responses by local communities to global economic restructuring. The case study of Chipata in Zambia demonstrates how Africa’s largest retailer, Shoprite, had a “benchmark” practice in the form of a local supplier arrangement forced upon it by the direct action of a local community. Introduction In 1998, an enterprising academic at the University of Zambia, Dr. Yambayamba, sent students from the Department of Philosophy and Applied Business Ethics on a research trip (Interview, Dr Yambayamba, founding member of The Partnership Forum, January 2007). Their aim was to interview villagers in the rural town of Chipata, a border town in the Eastern Province of Zambia in order to investigate poverty amongst the local villagers. Their research brought more than they had bargained for: they found complaints amongst villagers that there was a new 36 enemy in their midst. This enemy was the local supermarket that formed part of the South African chain of Shoprite supermarkets in Zambia. Vegetables regularly sold by villagers at the local town market were now being supplied from South Africa at the local Shoprite supermarket, opened in the same year. Because Shoprite had a better distribution system and a large supermarket, the farmers alleged they could not compete with this large company. Their resistance tactics were those of historic peasant movements: they would burn down the company that had robbed them of their livelihoods. The recent South African presence in Chipata, they claimed, brought a new cycle of poverty to local farming communities. Previous sources of cash income through the sale of their vegetables were now disrupted as people went to Shoprite to buy vegetables. Now they could not pay for the cash items they needed: hospital user fees, school fees, televisions and clothing. Their only solution was to burn down this new supermarket that was redirecting resources away from Luangeni local farmers. Before this threat could be carried out, however, the Shoprite company sent its emissaries in the form of their local Zambian managers. With the help of the local agricultural extension officer, the managers negotiated a supply deal for the supermarket with these local producers. The villagers were then commissioned to supply the company with five vegetables on a regular and efficient basis and all talk of burning the store abated. A key question arising from the above account is how a small, economically disempowered community of villagers in a marginal geographic location (Luangeni village in the Eastern Province of Zambia) was able to leverage such a significant ‘benchmarking’ concession from ‘Africa’s largest retailer’. This impoverished village community had grasped the political and economic attention of a powerful regional multinational, ostensibly with only a threat to burn the store. Not only had they commanded the company’s attention, the engagement with the company was formalized into a partnership forum for the provision of five vegetables to Shoprite. This article argues that this dispute demonstrates how local (and fragmentary) resistance has regional consequences due to the political conjuncture of post-Apartheid Southern Africa. Peasants historically had resorted to burning down the perceived source of their problems, a quick and direct form of political action that removed the physical form of the so-