Making a Living, Earning a Living: Work and Employment in Southern Africa

Abstract

This article examines the changing nature of work and employment in Southern Africa in the wake of liberalization, drawing on six case studies across the manufacturing, retail, and self-employed sectors. Liberalization has intensified competition, leading to the evolution of three different “worlds of work” in which some workers benefit from global integration, some survive in employment, but under worse conditions, and others are retrenched and forced to “make a living” in informal and unpaid work. This has created a “crisis of representation” in which traditional organizational forms, such as trade unions, fail to provide a voice for the “new poor,” necessitating the creation of new coalitions to respond to liberalization.