Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T07:17:27.760Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Representing foreign workers in the private security industry: a South African perspective on trade union engagement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2014

Steven Gordon  and
Brij Maharaj
Steven Gordon*
Affiliation:
Democracy Governance & Service Delivery research programme, Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), Durban, South Africa. 750 Francois Road, Intuthuko Junction, Cato Manor, Durban, South Africa 4001
Brij Maharaj
Affiliation:
School of Agricultural, Earth and Environmental Science, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Howard College Campus, Durban, South Africa 4041
*
Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In recent years South African cities have become home to a large number of undocumented migrant workers. If trade unions do not organise undocumented migrant workers, it opens up such workers to exploitation and maltreatment by employers, thereby creating a split labour market that undermines the entire labour movement. This article focuses on the responses of the national trade union movement in the private security sector to the presence of undocumented workers at the grassroots level. Using a case study approach, we find that the pressures of labour market informalisation in the industry prompt unions to seek to maintain and advance their position from their traditional support base of citizen workers rather than attempt to include new groups. The failure to engage is reinforced by anti-immigrant attitudes which link foreigners with problems in the industry such as low wages and portrays such workers as co-conspirators rather than comrades. While justice and solidarity have always been the foundation of trade unionism in South Africa, the movement is in danger of failing this test if the current situation in terms of the exclusion of undocumented foreign workers persists.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , March 2014 , pp. 123 - 149
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Arrighi, G., Aschoff, N. & Scully, B.. 2010. ‘Accumulation by dispossession and its limits: the southern Africa paradigm revisited’, Studies in Comparative International Development 45, 4: 410–38.Google Scholar
Baker, B. 2002. ‘Living with non-state policing in South Africa: the issues and dilemmas’, Journal of Modern African Studies 40, 1: 29–53.Google Scholar
Barchiesi, F. 2011. Precarious Liberation: Workers, the State, and Contested Social Citizenship in Postapartheid South Africa. Albany, NY: State University of New York.Google Scholar
Buhlungu, S. 2010. A Paradox of Victory: COSATU and the Democratic Transformation in South Africa. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.Google Scholar
Burawoy, M. 1976. ‘The functions and reproduction of migrant labor: comparative material from Southern Africa and the United States’, American Journal of Sociology 81, 5: 1050–87.Google Scholar
Buur, L., Jensen, S. & Stepputat, F. (eds) 2007. ‘The nationalist imperative: South Africanisation, regional integration and mobile livelihoods’, in The Security-Development Nexus: expressions of sovereignity and securitisation. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrika Institutet/Cape Town: HSRC Press, 63–84.Google Scholar
Castells, M. 1975. ‘Immigrant workers and class struggles in advanced capitalism: the Western European experience’, Politics & Society 5, 1: 33–66.Google Scholar
Castles, S. & Kosack, G.. 1973. Immigrant workers and class structure in Western Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, for the Institute of Race Relations, London.Google Scholar
Cohen, R. 1989. ‘Citizens, denizens and helots: the politics of international migration flows in the post-war world’, Hitotsubashi Journal of Social Studies 21, 1: 153–65.Google Scholar
Crush, J. (ed.) 2008. The Perfect Storm: the realities of xenophobia in contemporary South Africa. Cape Town: Southern African Research Centre.Google Scholar
De Genova, N.P. 2002. ‘Migrant “illegality” and deportability in everyday life’, Annual Review of Anthropology 31, 1: 419–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Delgado, H.L. 1993. New Immigrants, Old Unions: Organizing Undocumented Workers in Los Angeles. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Fitzgerald, I. & Hardy, J.. 2010. ‘“Thinking Outside the Box”? Trade union organizing strategies and Polish migrant workers in the United Kingdom’, British Journal of Industrial Relations 48, 1: 131–50.Google Scholar
Gray, K. 2007. ‘From human to workers' rights?: the emergence of a migrant workers' union movement in Korea’, Policy 21, 2: 297–315.Google Scholar
Hlatshwayo, M. 2011. ‘Is there room for international solidarity within South African Borders? COSATU's responses to the xenophobic attacks of May 2008’, Politikon 38, 1: 169–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacobson, R. & Geron, K.. 2008. ‘Unions and the politics of immigration’, Socialism and Democracy 22, 3: 105–22.Google Scholar
Jordhus-Lier, D. 2013. ‘The geographies of community-oriented unionism: scales, targets, sites and domains of union renewal in South Africa and beyond’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 38, 1: 36–49.Google Scholar
Kenny, B. 2007. ‘Claiming workplace citizenship: “worker” legacies, collective identities and divided loyalties of South African contingent retail workers’, Qualitative Sociology 30, 4: 481–500.Google Scholar
Landau, L.B. 2010. ‘Loving the alien? Citizenship, law, and the future in South Africa's demonic society’, African Affairs 109, 435: 213–30.Google Scholar
McGovern, P. 2007. ‘Immigration, labour markets and employment relations: problems and prospects’, British Journal of Industrial Relations 45, 2: 217–35.Google Scholar
McKinley, D. 2006. ‘Democracy and social movements in South Africa’, in Padayachee, V., ed. The Development Decade? Economic and social change in South Africa, 1994–2004. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 413–26.Google Scholar
Milkman, R. 2011. ‘Immigrant workers, precarious work, and the US labor movement’, Globalizations 8, 3: 361–72.Google Scholar
Nattrass, N. & Seekings, J.. 2001. ‘Democracy and distribution in highly unequal economies: the case of South Africa’, Journal of Modern African Studies 39, 3: 471–98.Google Scholar
Neocosmos, M. 2006. From “Foreign Natives” to “Native Foreigners”: Explaining xenophobia in post-apartheid South Africa. Dakar: Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa.Google Scholar
Penninx, R. & Roosblad, J.. 2000. Trade Unions, Immigration, and Immigrants in Europe, 1960–1993: a comparative study of the attitudes and actions of trade unions in seven West European countries. New York: Berghahn Books.Google Scholar
Seekings, J. 2004. ‘Trade unions, social policy & class compromise in post-apartheid South Africa’, Review of African Political Economy 31, 100: 299–312.Google Scholar
Segatti, A. 2011. ‘Migration to South Africa: regional challenges versus national instruments and interests’, In Landau, L. & Segatti, A., eds. Contemporary Migration to South Africa: A Regional Development Issue. London: World Bank Publications, 9–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Standing, G. 2011. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.Google Scholar
Trimikliniotis, N. 2009. ‘The use and abuse of undeclared and unprotected labour: migration, Europeanisation and the role of trade unions’, in Neergaard, A., ed. European Perspectives on Exclusion and Subordination: the political economy of migration. Maastricht: Shaker, 177–199.Google Scholar
Trimikliniotis, N., Gordon, S. & Zondo, B.. 2008. ‘Globalisation and migrant labour in a “Rainbow Nation”: a fortress South Africa?’, Third World Quarterly 29, 7: 1323–39.Google Scholar
Vigneswaran, D. 2011. ‘Migration control, documentation, and state transformation’, in Landau, L. & Segatti, A., eds. Contemporary Migration to South Africa: A Regional Development Issue. London: World Bank Publications, 177–99.Google Scholar
Waterman, P. 1975. ‘The “Labour Aristocracy“in Africa: Introduction to a Debate’, Development and Change 6, 3: 57–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Webster, E. & Von Holdt, K.. 2005. Beyond the Apartheid Workplace: studies in transition. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.Google Scholar
Webster, E., Lambert, R. & Beziudenhout, A.. 2011. Grounding Globalization: Labour in the age of insecurity. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Wolpe, H. 1972. ‘Capitalism and cheap labour power in South Africa: from segregation to apartheid’, Economy and Society 1, 4: 425–56.Google Scholar

Newspapers and other sources

Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg).

Official publications

COSATU Submission on the White Paper on International Migration. Presented to the Portfolio Committee on Home Affairs on 19 May 2000.

Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). 2009. Final Draft Consolidated Resolutions to the COSATU 10th National Congress. Congress of South African Trade Unions, Johannesburg.

Interviews

National Security & Unqualified Workers Union (Nasuwu) trade union leader (a) Durban (Nasuwu offices). 10.8.2006.

National Security & Unqualified Workers Union (Nasuwu) trade union leader (b) Durban (Nasuwu offices). 11.8.2006.

National Security & Unqualified Workers Union (Nasuwu) trade union leader (c) Durban (Nasuwu offices). 12.8.2006.

National Security & Unqualified Workers Union (Nasuwu) trade union leader (d) Durban (Nasuwu offices). 13.8.2006.

National Security & Unqualified Workers Union (Nasuwu) shop steward (a) Durban (Nasuwu offices). 10.8.2006.

National Security & Unqualified Workers Union (Nasuwu) shop steward (b) Durban (Nasuwu offices). 14.8.2006.