The moral economy of work: Demanding jobs and deserving money in South Africa

Abstract

Why would the long-term unemployed poor continue to insist that wage labour must remain the key path to income – even in a place like South Africa, with endemic structural unemployment and spiralling inequality? This paper explores this puzzle using in-depth qualitative data from inner-city Johannesburg to unravel the ways in which people’s economic expectations are embedded in moral beliefs that equate effort and labour with deservingness and income. To make sense of such moral logics and discourses, this paper theorizes them as part of a cohesive moral economy. This shared moral economy illuminates the means though which norms of fairness, deservingness and aspiration underpin attitudes about redistribution, cash and labour, and thus influence both support and resistance to particular political agendas around radical redistributory economic reform.