4.611 Edicto de notificación de la providencia de apremio a

The methodology and research strategy that I have adopted for this work respond to my definition of social citizenship as a contested terrain shaped by the encounter of discourse and narratives “from above” and “from below”. Empirical materials I have used can be divided into workplace- and policy-related. Policy-related materials include archival and documentary sources and interviews with strategic informants in government departments, academic and political institutions and programmes that are engaged in the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of social policies. Informants include trade union officials acting in a policy capacity, government-based researchers, academics

1 Cit. in Cohen, T., “Mandela Says Sacrifice is a Part of ‘New Patriotism’”, Business Day, 21 June 1996.

involved in policy processes, officials in bargaining institutions like the National Economic Development and Labour Council (NEDLAC) and policy-related functionaries in the government departments of Social Development (formerly Welfare and Population Development), Labour, Health and Housing.

I have focused both the content of interviews and documentary search on programmes (unemployment insurance, social security, state pensions, social healthcare, housing subsidies) and policy processes (especially the 1997 White Paper on Welfare, the 1998 Jobs Summit and the 2001 governmental inquiry into comprehensive social security) whose policy objects have a direct bearing on the question of decommodification.

Subsequently, I have looked at workers’ changing meanings of waged employment in relation to access to social citizenship and broader visions of social stability and emancipation. In this regard I have focused on two specific case studies, where I have conducted semi-structured, qualitative interviews with different groups of workers. My adoption of a case study research strategy recognized that the process through which workers construct narratives and meanings of work is socially situated in localities that are also been shaped by worker solidarities and struggles, and therefore reinforce grassroots discourse.

Following De Certeau’s (1984: 115) suggestion that “narrative structures have the status of spatial syntaxes”, worker narratives are not disembodied and interchangeable but refer to the ways meanings “inhabit” spatial practices, physical workplaces, residential communities.

The first case I consider refers to manufacturing industry in the East Rand.

The relevance of this region is due to the fact that it constitutes South Africa’s historical manufacturing core, but during the 1990s it has undergone dramatic processes of industrial restructuring following rapid market liberalization. Job losses and extensive casualisation make therefore the East Rand a privileged place of observation for grassroots elaborations of changes in waged employment and its related meanings of stability and social advancement. I have deliberately chosen to focus on traditional manufacturing sectors, which had once benefited from state protection under apartheid, and unionized blue-collar workers as realities that are most dramatically, rapidly and comprehensively affected by

industrial restructuring, downsizing and retrenchments. My research looks at companies in the glass, paper and metal-engineering sectors, in which I have selected specific companies in consultation with trade union officials and local organisers. I conducted sixty interviews with workers in three metal-engineering plants and a further 80 in two glass packaging and two paper companies. I have also administered questionnaires on changes in production and employment conditions with shop-stewards and managers in three further glass and three paper companies.

My second case study focuses on a process of similarly rapid organizational change, but taking place in the public sector, among the employees in the waste and roads departments of the Greater Johannesburg Municipal Council (GJMC) under the restructuring exercise known as “iGoli 2002”. This latter is a process of corporatisation and privatisation of municipal service delivery which questions patterns of occupational stability and access to benefits that specifically characterize public employment. I have conducted, in particular, interviews with 40 workers in each department, plus two pilot group discussions, and conversations with depot and municipal managers.

Workplace interviews have taken place between July 1999 and April 2000.

In total, I have interviewed 220 workers, 209 of which African, trying to represent stratifications in terms of age, gender, occupation and nature of contracts of employment. The duration of interviews ranged from 45 to 90 minutes, and they were usually conducted in English, using other workers as interpreters when needed. Finally, interviews have largely taken place on company premises, usually inside facilities used for union activities. Approximately 15% of interviews, all of them with East Rand workers, have taken place in respondents’

homes. The representivity of my sample is, however, statistically unreliable as I have preferred qualitative interviewing over survey analysis, and the sample was constructed in non-probability ways. The sample was identified with a “snowball”

procedure, in which I first contacted shop-stewards through union organizers and then respondents were arranged by shop-stewards depending on time availability.

Finally, managers in both cases were asked to provide information on workplace changes in terms of restructuring, technological innovation, retrenchments,

subcontracting of operations and variations in “non-standard” employment (such as casuals, temporary workers, labour brokers).

I have arranged the selection of specific workplaces, and access thereof, in consultation with various union organizations, namely the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), the Chemical, Energy, Print, Paper, Wood and Allied Workers Union (CEPPWAWU) and the South African and Municipal Workers Union (SAMWU). Contacts with the unions was greatly facilitated by my employment at the University of the Witwatersrand and membership in the Sociology of Work Unit (SWOP), a research organization with a remarkable tradition of labour-orientated analysis. In return for access to shop stewards and company structures, I have provided research spin-offs for the unions, especially SAMWU through my participation in the Municipal Services Project.

The choice of my two case studies was determined by their similarities and differences, which allowed to identify continuities and discontinuities in the ways in which workers respond to changes in employment and its shifting social meanings. In both cases, in fact, waged employment and unionization have deeply shaped collective solidarity and meanings of socio-political emancipation in the transition from apartheid to democracy. The experience of wage labour was in fact in both cases co-terminous with resistance to exploitative relations, precarious forms of work, managerial despotism and racialised workplace authoritarianism.

Such features have in particular shaped South Africa’s African working class as a subject deprived of citizenship, which in both my case studies was the product of state racism, residential and workplace segregation and the experience of migrancy under conditions of bureaucratic coercion. Through unionization and workplace organization wage labour could, conversely, become a repository of citizenship claims and collective power rooted in workers’ democratic imagery.

Restructuring, retrenchments and casualisation under late apartheid and the first decade of democracy question, however, labour’s early social imageries and expectations for social rights. These processes induce the replacement of cohesive workers’ identities with a diversified range of coping strategies and responses along the workplace-community continuum. The comparison between private and

public workplaces further enables to capture such diversity by amplifying the range of its manifestations.

My workplace interviews required a basic set of information on individual biographies, wage levels, access to social provisions, and the relationships between wages, benefits, social provisions and household expenditures. In particular, I have looked at changes in employer-funded retirement benefits and healthcare, dwelling types and expenditures, use and access of public services, levels of commodification in national and municipal services, wage distribution to unemployed relatives and extended families, and the amount and types of family expenses. Interviews are mostly focused, however, on changing workers’

meanings of their jobs in relation to social citizenship and social advancement. I first addressed perceptions of workplace- and job-related problems (permanence of factory authoritarianism, sense of exploitation, persistence of racial hierarchies) to assess respondents’ sense of fulfillment, realization and future prospects on the job.

Impacts of restructuring, prospects of job losses, growing casualisation highlight respondents’ feelings of insecurity and how they affect occupational self-perceptions and prospects. I then looked at changing views of how adequate monetary wages are in satisfying household needs, with the associated shifts in perceptions of individual and household quality of life. My aim was to elaborate how commodification in workers’ everyday lives is subjectively related to the changing nature of work. I have subsequently addressed alternative strategies used to cope with changing subjective experiences of wage labour, in particular in those cases where restructuring and growing vulnerability are most adversely felt and lead to relying on community-based support mechanisms and individualized self-entrepreneurial strategies. Finally, I have discussed respondents’ political meanings and responses to changes in wage labour in relation to their social citizenship claims. This refers to questions on the sources of organized, collective power and participation (trade unions, associational life, political participation) that potentially enable workers to negotiate and contest the wage-citizenship nexus. Interviews have also focused on the respondents’ changing perception of government delivery and potential for public interventions, to evaluate to what

extent a rights-based discourse of decommodification is emerging in response to changes in the relationships between wage labour and access to social citizenship.

Even if I have always introduced myself as an independent researcher working on a doctoral dissertation, the fact that my access was facilitated by local union organizations has probably influenced workers’ verbalization of narratives and perceptions. In fact, the urgency of changes, the growing occupational insecurity and the disorientation in organized responses emphasized the respondents’ needs to elaborate their experiences in ways that underlined the

“traumatic” impact of recent adverse changes. This was particularly the case with GJMC employees, for which the rapid implementation of a restructuring plan whose outlines were largely unknown at the time of the interviews was a decisive challenge to time-honoured practices that characterized conditions of employment in the public sector as relatively more stable and protected than in the private one.

The way workers elaborate meanings with the purpose of responding to challenges of recent changes highlight a general problem with qualitative research and its claim to objectivity and empirical representivity. Mindful of methological debates between proponents of “grounded theory” and “extended case method”

(Burawoy, 1991b; Corbin and Strauss, 1998), I addressed this problem by maintaining throughout my fieldwork a combination of inductive and deductive approaches. On one hand I have related to my respondents with a basic set of questions in mind derived from a theoretical problem, the relationship between wage labour and social citizenship, that is not self-evident in respondents’

experiential world. To avoid making respondents mere objects of knowledge, similarly to what I criticize in expert policy discourse, I have paid specific attention to what Michael Burawoy (1991a) discusses as reflexivity and theoretical reconstruction in his discussion of ethnographic research practice.

According to him, fieldwork produces its own theory and claims to generalization, rather than merely provide materials to be evaluated at the end on the basis of predefined interpretative frames. At the same time, the focus on processes of signification in my definition of social citizenship emphasizes the explanatory power of workers’ narratives as a plane of reality that, albeit symptomatic of the need to rationalize social existence, does not presuppose reference to a

pre-conceived, theory-laden objective reality as a criterion of validation (White, 1990). Questions, themes and problems touched in my interviews have been modified as a result of the interviewing process itself instead of, as in grounded theory approaches, being functional to coding tags premised on the possibility of identifying causative interactions. In this sense, workers’ own redefinitions of experiences and meanings in response to contingent perceptions and states of mind become epistemologically relevant as sources of knowledge and objectivity.

Finally, the non-probability nature of my sample and the open-endedness of interviews refuse statistical inference as a superior validation of findings.

Following Burawoy’s (1991b: 281) suggestion that case analysis aims at

“societal”, rather than “statistical” significance, I did not point at predictions based on causative relations between changes in wage labour and responses in terms of social citizenship discourse. Rather, both transformations of wage labour and workers’ social citizenship imagery are at the centre of processes of production of meanings that are highly respondent to contingent elements, situational factors, value systems and individual biographies. The “societal”

significance of my study resides therefore in a mode of plausibility that emerges out of internal patterns of consistency and divergence in the meanings provided by respondents, rather than in a quest for objectivity to “explain” respondents’

meanings and strategies. In this sense, consistency and “typicality” was balanced with a positive appreciation of individualized “anomalies”. These latter, in fact, emphasize gaps and loopholes in existing generalizations, policy frameworks and theories, becoming therefore the basis of critical counter-theories (Burawoy, 1991b).

Therefore, both the emergence of similar elaborations and perceptions and their diversification contribute to establish the linkage between wage labour and social citizenship in workers’ narratives and discourses. Meanings are social facts embedded in respondents’ reflexivity and stimulated by the interview situation, influenced as this may be by the knowledge effect of the interviewer’s “pre-dialogical” problem grid (Maso, 1996; Rapley, 2001; Mauthner and Doucet, 2003).

My choice of a qualitative approach also responds to limitations in mainstream analyses of unemployment, poverty and inequality in South Africa.

During the first decade of democracy, a host of statistical analyses, both surveys and panel studies, have been produced, which enhance a nuanced, multi-dimensional understanding of social problems. It is here sufficient to mention the 1993 SALDRU-World Bank report on poverty and inequality, the 1993 KwaZulu-Natal Income Dynamics Study, the 2001 “Mesebetsi Labour Force Study”

conducted by the Norwegian agency for international development (FAFO), and the official Labour Force Surveys by Statistics South Africa. It is now possible to produce highly sophisticated explanations of determinants of poverty supported by interrelated data series that account for multifaceted overlaps of income, race, gender, education and location.

Policy-orientated statistical analyses aimed at shaping knowledge of social processes functional to viable policy solutions, however, tend to reproduce the already mentioned dualistic mode of conceptualization, which leads to waged employment being unproblematically idealized as the basis of social citizenship, inclusion and responsibility. This approach is at risk of marginalizing the need for a critical understanding focused on internal contradictions and conflicts underlying notions of “employment”, “wage”, “poverty” and “inclusion”. The same can be said about grounded theory’s sometimes purported concern with identifying “transferable” conclusions as a tool for social advocacy (Chritcher, Waddington and Dicks, 1999). As Jacques Ranciere (2004: 169) warns, not only does social science put at the service of policy solutions create its own objects of analysis, for example identifying problems with specific groups like “the poor”

and the “unemployed”. In fact, sociological facts as a selection of relevant statistical figures also produce their own interpretation out of the value-based identification of relevant variables. For Ranciere this outcome is the product of fixed, static representations of “the poor” as acting in accordance with clear-cut options (for example, job-seeking behaviour versus welfare dependency) that minimize and contain unpredictability and complexities in underlying modes of signification. Therefore, the ways in which contested signification interrogates structured social inequalities and power relations is obscured:

The justice of statistics continuously dissolves the sociological object, producing in short its own doxa – demystification, which returns pure ideas to the impure inertia of domination. Wherever it goes, sociology finds itself preceded by its shadow or its simulacrum: the approximation of its conclusions, which are supported by the statistics of its domain (Ranciere, 2004: 169; own emphasis).

Significational conflicts and contradictions, on the other hand, emerge clearly once the researcher’s attention move from “measuring” respondents lives towards the meanings they attach to them.

Similar concerns were quite present in apartheid-age radical critical research that emphasized the relevance of ethnography and case analyses as a mode of social inquiry that was skeptical of the disempowering effects of statistical surveys as a mode of knowledge ultimately dependent on expert validation (Wilson and Ramphele, 1989). Recent developments in research methodology on welfare, especially from feminist authors, emphasise the need to critically depart from institutionally formulated knowledge of social subjects and problems and re-evaluate the subjectivity and agency of recipients. This is shaped by the intersection of institutional definitions and experiences of power,

“differential vulnerability” and coping strategies, all acting as intermediate concepts, defined along lines of gender, race and household, situated between the individual and socio-political institutions (Williams, Popay and Oakley, 1999).

Therefore, the provision of rights and entitlements that realize normative social citizenship frameworks does not follow a linear path from providers to recipients that are fixed in institutionalized group identities. As the nature and content of identities fluctuates in response to social experiences, entitlements are also contested based on changing configurations and significations of grassroots discourses of rights and power. In the final analysis, focusing on signification and subjectivity questions the pretense by the state to be the source of social citizenship on the basis of its universalising rights discourse. As I elaborate in the next chapter, identity-based social claim-making is contradictory in the sense that it questions present allocations of rights while recognizing the state’s ultimate prerogative to validate identities and claims. This contradiction is however part of

the historical trajectory of social citizenship itself. Focusing on the state would, conversely, mutilate the understanding of the concept reducing it to the sphere of governance and eluding its aspects as a social movement shaped by everyday struggles for signification of rights and power.