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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
Is the concept of reserve army of labour useful to understand Soweto's unemployed?
| Panel |
59. Class in contemporary Africa
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| Paper ID | 687 |
| Author(s) |
Ceruti, Claire ; Mudau, Rudzani
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | How are we to classify the 30% to 40% of working age people without jobs and in informal work like street vending, home shops and roadside repairs in Soweto? How do they classify themselves? How do they connect with the formally employed? And should they be conceived of as part of the working class or as a separate class, as Seekings argues? Marx presents the ?surplus population? as that part of the working class which is not needed by business at any given time. They are left to fend for themselves or carried by the working population until business needs them, if it ever needs them. Our research in Soweto suggests that working and unemployed perceive a divide amongst themselves, roughly related to the ratio of unemployment and the quality of jobs in a household. However we found an intermingling of different worlds of work on the household level, and also that people move both out of formal work into unemployment but also in the other direction, though generally into less protected jobs. The paper further outlines the results of our survey which considers previous employment/unemployment, how long unemployed have been unemployed for, the employment density within households, mutual support and availability for work. It concludes by evaluating the concept of reserve army of labour in light of these findings.
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