Rupturing Relations: Abasebenzi as Collective Political Subject

Abstract

This chapter examines the experiences of black workers’ entry into retail service jobs in and around Johannesburg from the late 1960s to the 1980s. Black women were discriminated against in shops in a number of ways, which marked their difference in status and skill from white women. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, they organized and contested their marginalization, defining abasebenzi (isiZulu for workers) as a militant political subject, in contrast to white women. Workers organized through CCAWUSA. This race-class subject was a potent signifier, a particular response both to an already constituted labour process and to a realm of consumption defined through white women’s labour.