People refusing to be wealth: What happens when South African workers are denied access to “belonging in”

Abstract

Research on wealth‐in‐people has proven useful for studying relationships between employers and employees in capitalist systems, but scholars have largely ignored an idea introduced alongside the concept of wealth‐in‐people in Igor Kopytoff and Suzanne Miers's foundational 1977 study. Namely, these authors describe a continuum of ways in which people who are “wealth” to others become either included into or excluded from the groups benefiting from and controlling that wealth. In this article, I use that continuum to examine workplace relationships in South Africa that fall on the exclusion end of the continuum, where discrimination, lack of training and advancement opportunities, and bureaucratic distancing prevent workers from “belonging in” workplace power structures. Drawing on twelve months of fieldwork in low‐wage workplaces and surrounding communities in KwaZulu‐Natal, South Africa, I argue that many workers in such settings respond by withholding their loyalty from employers, thereby limiting the extent to which they will “belong to” employers as wealth‐in‐people. This article sheds light on a popular discourse in South Africa and elsewhere that has criticized low‐waged and unemployed workers for refusing to be model workers. Such workers follow a logic of refusing to “belong to” when they are denied opportunities to “belong in,” thereby heightening one form of estrangement while potentially resisting another.