This book argues that we need to focus attention on the ways that workers themselves have invested subjectively in what it means to be a worker. By doing so, we gain an explanation that moves us beyond the economic decisions made by actors, the institutional constraints faced by trade unions, or the power of the state to interpellate subjects. These more common explanations make workers and their politics visible only as a symptom of external conditions, a response to deregulated markets or a product of state recognition. Instead - through a history of retailing as a site of nation and belonging, changing legal regimes, and articulations of race, class and gender in the constitution of political subjects from the 1930s to present-day Wal-Mart - this book presents the experiences and subjectivities of workers themselves to show that the collective political subject 'workers' (abasebenzi) is both a durable and malleable political category. From white to black women's labour, the forms of precariousness have changed within retailing in South Africa. Workers' struggles in different times have in turn resolved some dilemmas and by other turn generated new categories and conditions of precariousness, all the while explaining enduring attachments to labour politics.

Bridget Kenny is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. She works on labour, gender and consumption with a specific focus on service work, precarious employment, and political subjectivity.

Two for the Price of One: The Inadequacies of Instrumentalism

Servicing South Africa: Retail Spaces as Nation

Law and the Category of Employee

Subjects-in-Struggle: The Political Subjectivity of Retail Workers

Chapter 2. Servicing a Nation: White Women Shop Assistants and the Fantasy of Belonging

Retail Capital, the City and White Belonging

White Women's Service Labour

Skill and Status

Rules and Respectability

Retail Expansion, Deskilling and Racial Reorganization

The Necessary Familiarity of White Women's Labour

Chapter 3. Rupturing Relations: Abasebenzi as Collective Political Subject

Black Women's Service Work: Discriminatory Conditions and Racist Relations

Refusing Erasure, Rupturing the Logic of Relations: Abasebenzi Emerge

CCAWUSA and Collective Labour Politics

Chapter 4. Regulating Retail: The Category Employee and its Divisions

Subjects of Employment Law: Employee and Labourer

Part-time Employment: From Responsible Motherhood to Monstrous Deprivation

Casual Employment: Student Labour, Extra Help and Scabs

Chapter 5. Signifying Belonging: Restructuring and Workplace Relations

The Hypers: Revolutionizing Modern Retailing, 1975 to the 1990s

A Culture of Threat: Changing Workplace Relations from the late 1990s

Subjectification of Workers: Outsider, Criminal, Labourer

Chapter 6. Tools Down, Everybody out to the Canteen!: Wildcats and Go-slows, Political Subjects Reconfigured

We are Grown-Ups: Permanent Workers as Adult Decision-makers

I must Make a Sale: Contract Workers as Skilled Men

[We] Bring more Money: Casual Workers as Exploited Labour

Joint Actions: Race and Rights

Chapter 7. To Sit at Home and Do Nothing: Gender and the Constitutive Meaning of Work

Sitting: Statis as Social Death

The Praxis of Providing

Gendered Anxieties: Working for Children, Working for the Future

Chapter 8. Consuming Politics: Wal-Mart, the New Terrain of Belonging and the Endurance of Abasebenzi

The Market as Nation

Labour Broking and Bulk Labour Supply

The Law and Political Subject Abasebenzi

Conclusion: Enduring Retail Worker Politics