Claiming Workplace Citizenship: “Worker” Legacies, Collective Identities and Divided Loyalties of South African Contingent Retail Workers.

Casual and contract employment increased in South African food retailing in the 1990s, opening divisions of labor on shop floors among black workers previously unified. Literature on labor mobilization concentrates on institutional strategies to organize contingent workers. Explaining new segmentation among retail workers, this paper finds that a notion of what it meant to be a “worker” is also relevant for explaining obstacles to mobilization. “Worker” legacies were shaped in the 1980s and carried forward with shifting emphases in the post-apartheid period. These processes reproduced a normative notion of worker as full-time, permanent employee and labor rights as codified in a narrowed employment relationship. Casual and contract workers experienced work as a series of exclusions from rights and respect within the workplace vis-à-vis permanent workers. Contingent workers protested their marginalization by reclaiming their inclusion within workplace relations, within a workplace citizenship. In the process, divisions of labor deepened. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]