Precarious workers and the labour process : a multi-sited case study of management control and worker resistance

Abstract: One of the most notable changes to the industrial workplace in post-apartheid South Africa has been the rise of precarious forms of employment. In almost any given factory in South Africa today, a large number of workers are often employed under labour brokers, outsourced companies or on casual contracts. This dissertation analyses how the industrial labour process is being reorganised through the increased use of precarious labour and the impact this has on workers and their organisations. The dominant sociological literature on the post-apartheid workplace often treats precarious workers as a substratum of the labour process, categorising them as a ‘non-core’ section of the labour force (see Webster & Von Holdt, 2005). This dissertation returns to Marxist labour process theory to demonstrate that precarious forms of employment have in fact become central to capital’s valorisation model in the current period. Through a multi-sited case study of four manufacturing workplaces in Ekurhuleni, east of Johannesburg, this study presents a detailed picture of how manufacturing capital is choosing to organise its labour power. The findings reveal that precarious workers are found at every level of the industrial labour process, alongside and increasingly in place of permanent workers. In addition, this dissertation documents the response of capital to the 2015 amendments to the Labour Relations Act (LRA), which attempted to restrict labour broking to work of a ‘genuinely temporary nature’. The study documents a number of ways in which manufacturing companies have attempted to restructure in order to circumvent the amendments and persist with precarious employment schemes in different forms. The dissertation argues that the rise of precarious forms of employment has resulted in an extreme fracturing of the labour process, atomising workers inside the factory. This has radically transformed the terrain of workplace struggle. The findings indicate that decades of these neoliberal restructuring initiatives have contributed to a crisis of trade unionism at workplace level, but have also generated new struggles from below where precarious workers have been testing out a wide range of tactical and organisational approaches in their struggles for permanent jobs.M.A. (Sociology