Southern and South African labor history has, at least since the 1970s, been as much about the future of the region as about its past. Liberal scholars saw in apartheid and segregation irrational aberrations to the color-blind logic of capitalism. They believed the apartheid state to be an instrument of racial dominance but saw it as more or less neutral in terms of class relations. Economic growth and the abolishment of racial laws would bring freedom and equality—or at least equal opportunities. On the other hand, radical historians and sociologists thought of apartheid as a system that guaranteed the exploitation of cheap black labor for the benefit of capital. For them, apartheid was functional to capitalism.Footnote ² While both the liberal and the radical positions were often more nuanced than the other side would admit, the question that divided these two camps was one about politics and strategy: Would capitalist development bring an end to racial domination, or was it part of the problem? In the latter case, challenging apartheid and colonialism would also involve challenging capitalism. The vibrancy of these debates should continue to serve as an inspiration for labor historians. I will argue that for the Left to be able to formulate viable alternatives to present policies, we should look at the history and nature of labor and inequality in the region.

Before making this argument, however, I briefly need to revisit the historiography and recent political and labor market developments. Scholars on the Left shifted the emphasis from race to class and emphasized working-class solidarities. They were often actively involved in organized labor and the liberation movement. Challenging the idea that the traditional and rural allegiances of migrant workers inhibited the formation of an urban working-class consciousness, they wrote about the rise of an African proletariat. Decades earlier, the Rhodes-Livingstone scholars in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) described the emergence of the modern, urban African on the Copperbelt in reaction to theories of “culture contact” that justified segregation.Footnote ³ The rest of the subcontinent featured mostly as labor reservoirs in writings about South African labor; the gold mines of the Witwatersrand were at the center of a vast network of organized and independent migrations of African laborers. Harold Wolpe argued, against the liberal dual-economy model, that the supposedly traditional economies of sending areas could not be considered separate from the modern South African economy that received this labor.Footnote ⁴ Marxists also took issue with the exclusivist tendencies of African nationalism and established their own political relevance in the struggle on the basis of class solidarity rather than racial politics.Footnote ⁵

This radical tradition drew criticism for its functionalism and lack of attention to African agency and culture.Footnote ⁶ In particular, these scholars reduced the role of women in this system of capitalist oppression to a question of reproduction of labor.Footnote ⁷ The need to understand culture and tradition as more than a false consciousness was made painfully clear by the political violence of the 1980s and 1990s, which took place largely along ethnic lines. Culture and gender thus made their way back into the study of South African labor, and the richest work has managed to discuss concerns of rural and traditional identity, gender, and sexuality, without losing firm ground in the political economy of labor.Footnote ⁸ In the 1990s the study of labor also had to adjust to a new political context and to the changing nature of work in South Africa. Since labor historiography centered on debates about the future of apartheid and colonialism, the transition to democracy could have signaled its end. It did not, and 1994 saw the publication of two seminal works on the intersections of culture and labor migration.Footnote ⁹ The violence of transition and the lessened urgency of the struggle against both racial discrimination and capitalist exploitation facilitated this shift.

With the advent of democracy, organized labor ventured into a new and unfamiliar terrain. There is little doubt that the labor movement has been instrumental to liberation ever since the 1973 strikes in Durban. Although African and multiracial trade unions were often conflicted about the question of whether they should fight for political liberation or solely focus on industrial demands, the formation of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) in 1985 confirmed unions' strategic and central role in the antiapartheid struggle. After their unbanning, this trade union federation formed a so-called tripartite alliance with its partners in the struggle, the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP). While this political partnership afforded the labor movement privileged access to the centers of political power, it came with great contradictions. The ANC's decision in 1996 to discard its Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP), which bore COSATU's intellectual stamp, in favor of the neoliberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy (GEAR), exposed the difficulty of COSATU's position. Despite its dissatisfaction, the federation continued to operate as part of the alliance, eventually throwing its weight behind Jacob Zuma to replace Thabo Mbeki in 2007. Whether Zuma's presidency is living up to its more Leftist credentials remains questionable.

It was not only the new political landscape that changed the role of organized labor in South Africa; unions also had internal challenges to deal with. Support for ANC policies caused rifts between the leadership and the rank and file, and some of the most experienced union leaders and shop stewards found opportunities for upward mobility in management, government, and self-employment.Footnote ¹⁰ Even more problematic for the trade union movement were the changes in the labor market and policy. The 1990s witnessed spectacular growth in unemployment, which also took its toll on family life with dropping marriage rates, men who could not or did not live up to their expected roles as providers, and an increase in transactional sex.Footnote ¹¹ Moreover, while new legislation brought improved labor standards for those with secure jobs, outsourcing and increased use of flexible contracts undermined these gains and made precarious labor increasingly the norm. Many of these changes are discussed by Franco Barchiesi, who is critical of the government and organized labor's emphasis on having a stable job as a social good in a context where few people can actually achieve this.Footnote ¹²

These developments and unions' difficulties in reaching out to this new precariat force us to think beyond working-class solidarities. With unemployment at twenty to forty percent (depending on the definition), millions surviving in the informal sector, and many more in precarious jobs, it is tempting to see union members with secure work as the privileged few—indeed, sometimes they are. The rise of new social movements outside of the tripartite alliance, for example shack-dweller and antiprivatization movements, partially reflects the failure of COSATU and its alliance partners to connect with the poor.Footnote ¹³ To what extent can the labor movement, which of course does not have to mean COSATU, then still be a progressive force? And, where does this leave labor history? There may have been a time when scholars of South African labor romanticized working-class solidarity (much like some activists and academics may see new social movements through a rosy lens), but conflict between traditionalist rural migrants and urban workers in the 1980s or tensions between skilled and unskilled workers paint a more complex picture.Footnote ¹⁴ The xenophobic violence of 2008 highlighted the failure of the Left to present a progressive alternative that addressed the frustrations of the poor. Studying the relation between formal wage laborers, the unemployed, and informal workers is a necessary first step towards reestablishing the relevance of labor history.

Southern African workers have by and large not become the typical urban proletariat that the Rhodes-Livingstone scholars or South African Marxists expected them to become (i.e., urban stable wage earners with a working-class consciousness). The affirmation of class over race and culture often resulted in a metanarrative of modernization, a proletarianization thesis. Progressive intellectuals were politically invested in portraying African workers as proletarians and in discussing labor migration as a transitional stage artificially perpetuated by colonial and apartheid policies. This account challenged the conception, used to legitimize segregation, of migrant labor as a choice of essentially rural and traditional Africans who wanted to maintain their rural livelihoods. However, James Ferguson and Deborah Potts note for Zambia and Zimbabwe, respectively, that unilinear models of social transformation, where rural and traditional African migrant workers slowly but unavoidably make the transition to a modern and urban working-class, do not reflect current developments.Footnote ¹⁵ The livelihoods of most workers' households are not based on wage labor alone. Faced with economic crises, urban dwellers rekindled rural connections, reinforced their claims to rural resources, and made up lost income in the informal sector. A southern African exceptionalism, however, has kept us from engaging with the rich literature on these more complex livelihoods elsewhere on the continent.

Mass unemployment, a growing informal sector, and increasingly flexible and precarious labor conditions force students of South and southern African labor to consider other aspects of workers' livelihoods than wage labor and to look at the lives of the unemployed and informal workers. The study of the informal sector appeared rather late in southern African studies, reflecting the relative novelty and limited scope of this sector compared to the rest of the continent.Footnote ¹⁶ Influx controls and similar segregationist policies in much of the subcontinent regulated urban in-migration and restricted opportunities for self-employment. White minority regimes did not like the economic independence that such strategies could offer Africans, and small-scale informal trade in public spaces did not fit their ideals of orderly urbanization. These measures targeted women in particular, as urban women were seen to enable urban African family life. Their opportunities to make a living in the city legally were severely curtailed.

Democracy did bring an end to many of these measures, and both urban African populations and informal trade grew exponentially. That is not to say that there was no informal sector before this point. My own research shows that Durban's dock workers in the 1950s usually had little enterprises on the side, and Iain Edwards describes how Africans eked out a living through brewing beer, selling groceries, and shack-renting in uMkhumbane, a settlement on the outskirts of Durban.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet, preferring to stress either rural or proletarian consciousness, labor historians have often failed to give these strategies the attention they deserve, and with that they also frequently overlooked women's economic strategies.

The informal economy has in the last decade also become a prominent feature of South African policy discourse. Former President Thabo Mbeki famously talked about a first and a second economy, which are seen as structurally disconnected, a theme the party also took up.Footnote ¹⁸ This conception of the relation between these sectors draws on an older trope of economic dualism, which was criticized by the radical scholars of the 1970s. Academics too have taken up this dichotomous model. In an influential book, Jeremy Seekings and Nicoli Nattrass argue that there is a new fundamental socioeconomic divide that runs through South African society. For them, the unemployed and informal workers form a new underclass, which has interests opposed to those of the formal working class. Unionized employees seek to exclude competition for jobs, keeping the underclass out of the formal job market, and use their influence on the government to prioritize wage increases over job creation. Thus, Seekings and Nattrass conclude that trade unions carry at least some of the blame for the extent of poverty in South Africa and that sound economic policies should expand the number of low-waged, nonunionized employees.Footnote ¹⁹ Similar arguments can be found in the media, and Jacob Zuma made comparable remarks shortly after becoming the ANC president.Footnote ²⁰

Indeed, many see unionized workers as the privileged few. It has become commonplace to contend that job security and protected wage and labor standards, which result from collective bargaining and progressive legislation, hurt job creation. We need to question these assumptions. Certainly, unionized workers and this so-called underclass can have diverging interests and COSATU's alliance with the ruling party does come with inherent contradictions. Some unions have attempted to reach out to the unemployed and informal workers, but generally with limited success. Still, it may not be possible to divorce the interests of these two groups so neatly. Wolpe asserted that we cannot regard the traditional rural economies of labor-sending areas as separate from the modern economy. Similarly, we should not see the informal economy as separate from the formal one. Seekings and Nattrass' fundamental divide may actually mask redistribution within households, families, and communities and ignore links between the formal and the informal economy. Livelihood strategies are often too complex and multifaceted to allow for such a simple distinction.

Many households “straddle” the formal and informal economies, and their interests cannot be reduced to either sector. Dock workers in the 1950s combined formal and informal sources of income. Not only did they derive income from both sectors, it was often their formal job that made these informal strategies possible. For example, some pilfered cargoes, especially food, and used their wages to invest in small rural stores where their wives sold these pilfered and other goods. The flexibility of casual dock labor allowed them to divide their time between these businesses and stevedoring as they saw fit.Footnote ²¹ There are snippets of evidence of similar strategies used by female informal traders in the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote ²² These mixed livelihoods still exist in South Africa and may even be on the increase. Such strategies have been studied more extensively in other parts of the continent but have received limited attention in South Africa. Not only does the straddling of wage labor and the informal economy have a long history, it may also be more common today than is usually acknowledged.Footnote ²³ Moreover, the unemployed frequently rely on kin and household members who earn wages or receive old-age pensions or child-support grants, placing a growing responsibility on those with such income. The fortunes of the unemployed are thus often tied to those of wage-laborers. The latter are then not so much a privileged group as those on whom the burden of redistribution falls, sometimes straining family and household relations further.Footnote ²⁴ They, too, are the poor.

The interests of formal sector workers and this perceived underclass can conflict, but there is no clear divide between the two. Many unemployed have organized in new social movements around access to public services or social good such as housing, but the formal working-class too is involved in these movements and has a stake in these struggles. Furthermore, decent wages and job security for formal sector employees could benefit many of the unemployed and informal sector workers as well. They may receive remittances, their working capital could come from the wages of formal sector workers, and they often rely on wage laborers as customers. Indeed, inhabitants of uMkhumbane in the late 1940s considered wages the fertilizer of their informal and redistributive economy.Footnote ²⁵ To reaffirm the importance of working-class politics, we need to challenge the conceptual disconnect between the formal and the informal sectors and between the employed and the unemployed and not leave this discursive terrain to those who see only opposing interests between these groups. To do this, we need to remember some valuable lessons from the debates of the 1970s, namely that labor history needs to be about the future of southern African labor as much as about its past and that we cannot think about the economy as existing in different and disconnected spheres.