Migrant labor and community work-sharing as an alternative to social grants and public works programs: notes from South Africa

This paper investigates a community work-sharing arrangement organized for and by precariously employed workers and jobseekers in South Africa’s construction and manufacturing industries. As work in the country’s secondary sector has become increasingly flexible, casualized, and mobile since the end of apartheid, tradespeople are compelled to seek work through a practice of what they call “chasing the shut.” These jobseekers will constantly travel (“chasing”) throughout southern Africa, from one short-term work contract (“the shut”) to another, seeking work through labor brokers (temporary recruitment agencies) that link this pool of migrant workers to employers. Unsatisfied with these working and jobseeking conditions, in 2018, a group of non-unionized labor activists self-organized in Durban (KwaZulu-Natal Province) to form a community work-sharing arrangement between their township and the employers in the nearby industrial park. This paper traces how these activists usurped the role of the labor brokerages to subordinate the labor market to what I argue was a directly democratic politics and organization: work-sharing organized by the community across multiple employing firms to guarantee long-term and communal income security. Here, I investigate how this new form of post-unionized labor activism might contribute to ongoing debates surrounding universal basic income (UBI) and public works programs as models for thinking through solutions to the problem of precarity and work in the twenty-first century.