Precarious Work and the Gendered Individualisation of Risk in the South African Manufacturing Sector, 2002–2017
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Against the backdrop of workplace restructuring globally, post-apartheid South Africa is experiencing consistently high levels of unemployment, the deterioration of employment security and limited improvements in earnings. This article investigates the changing nature of labour-intensive production in the South African labour market and the gendered individualisation of risk associated with precarious or non-standard forms of employment. The article expands on the critical theoretical narrative about the challenges of labour under neo-liberalism by applying a gendered political economy analysis to the experiences of precariousness among workers in the South African manufacturing sector. By focusing on the interconnections between gender and political economy, this article delinks questions about the crisis of labour from a narrow focus on skills and refocuses our understanding in terms of the structural determinants of vulnerabilities in the labour market. The article argues that the gender composition of informal and precarious work in the post-apartheid labour market has significant implications for addressing the persistent racialised and gendered inequalities in the South African economy. KEYWORDS: labour market restructuring; informal employment; precarious work; gender JEL CLASSIFICATION: J21; J30; J71; J80
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".