Trading Time: Retail working time and precarious labour in South Africa, 1960s–1980s

Abstract

Abstract This is a historical piece that traces debates and struggles over store trading times (which determined working time) from the 1960s to the 1980s in Johannesburg, South Africa, to explore the connection of working time debates to the precarianisation of retail labour in South Africa over the ensuing decades. Debates about trading time and working time, and how unions engaged therein, were fundamentally linked with changes to the labour market of service workers over this period. This paper explores how the emergence of precarious labour in sectors like retail can be explained as conjunctural moments written from the global South. This research is based on extensive archival research which links regulatory changes, union politics, national debate and labour market changes to how shift systems in retailing changed between the 1960s and the 1980s.