Retail Worker Politics, Race and Consumption in South Africa

Gives flesh to precarious women service workers' subjectivities
Follows workers' struggles from white to black women's labour
Contextualizes debates around employment, inequality, poverty alleviation and labour politics from the perspective of a developing economy

Gives flesh to precarious women service workers' subjectivities Follows workers' struggles from white to black women's labour Contextualizes debates around employment, inequality, poverty alleviation and labour politics from the perspective of a developing economy

Autorentext

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.

Inhalt

Chapter 1. Introduction: Precarity in Store.- Chapter 2. Servicing a Nation: White Women Shop Assistants and the Fantasy of Belonging.- Chapter 3. Rupturing Relations: Abasebenzi as Collective Political Subject.- Chapter 4. Regulating Retail: The Category Employee and its Divisions.- Chapter 5. Signifying Belonging: Restructuring and Workplace Relations.- Chapter 6. Tools Down, Everybody out to the Canteen!: Wildcats and Go-slows, Political Subjects Reconfigured.- Chapter 7. To Sit at Home and Do Nothing: Gender and the Constitutive Meaning of Work.- Chapter 8. Consuming Politics: Wal-Mart, the New Terrain of Belonging and the Endurance of Abasebenzi.