Reclaiming Wage-Work: Power, Subordination and Contestation among Africa’s Precarious Workers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Amidst global labour insecurity and rising unemployment, a growing body of scholarship has called for the decentring of wage-work from the social and political imagination. For some scholars, this has involved a recentring of the study of entrepreneurship; for others, a focus on the possibilities of repeasantisation; still others have argued for the need to shift away from politics at the point of production altogether, and towards redistribution, with universal basic income gaining particular traction. However, as our research illustrates, wage-work has not disappeared; it has become more precarious. In the tradition of the work of Professor Edward Webster, this paper challenges the “end of labour” thesis by exploring what work is actually taking place, how it is being done and what the implications are for building worker power. We draw on three case studies of African workers, namely private security guards in South Africa, domestic workers in Mozambique, and platform workers in Kenya. For each case study, we explore the variegated forms of subordination to capital; the implications for workers’ identities, aspirations and political demands; the emerging structures of representation; and contestations that have emerged in the context of a declining trade union movement. We argue that wage-work continues to be important to workers’ identities and social reproduction, even as working arrangements are restructured through externalisation and the exclusion of whole categories of workers from labour protections.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".