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

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.

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