Ruth Castel-Branco, CASAS’ member, has published with Thabang Sefalafala this article in South African Review of Sociology.
Abstract: Amidst global labour insecurity and rising unemployment, a growing body of scholarship has called for the decentring of wage-work from the social and political imagination. For some scholars, this has involved a recentring of the study of entrepreneurship; for others, a focus on the possibilities of repeasantisation; still others have argued for the need to shift away from politics at the point of production altogether, and towards redistribution, with universal basic income gaining particular traction. However, as our research illustrates, wage-work has not disappeared; it has become more precarious. In the tradition of the work of Professor Edward Webster, this paper challenges the “end of labour” thesis by exploring what work is actually taking place, how it is being done and what the implications are for building worker power. We draw on three case studies of African workers, namely private security guards in South Africa, domestic workers in Mozambique, and platform workers in Kenya. For each case study, we explore the variegated forms of subordination to capital; the implications for workers’ identities, aspirations and political demands; the emerging structures of representation; and contestations that have emerged in the context of a declining trade union movement. We argue that wage-work continues to be important to workers’ identities and social reproduction, even as working arrangements are restructured through externalisation and the exclusion of whole categories of workers from labour protections.
Read the full article here: https://doi.org/10.1080/21528586.2025.2546483
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CASAS
The Collective of Agrarian Scholar-Activists from the Global South (CASAS) is a community of Scholar-Activists working in critical agrarian studies.