Asserting autonomy and belonging in precarious times: working lives of women labour broker workers in Johannesburg, South Africa

In this article, I present ethnographic insights into a precarious workers’ struggle at the Heineken Sedibeng brewery nearby Johannesburg. Through oral histories of key women organisers in this struggle, this article looks at the ways neoliberal externalisation of labour shapes contemporary working lives in South Africa. I use the concepts of autonomy and belonging to interpret workers’ realities and efforts to change precarious conditions. From the workers’ experiences and women’s biographies emerge two key contestations that reveal what it means to be a precarious worker under neoliberal capitalism. The first contestation exists inside South Africa’s labour relations system that creates conditions of unbelonging and precarity for the majority of workers. At the Heineken plant, the established union sided with the employers and entrenched externalised labour arrangements. The second contestation concerns the presence of violence in social relations negotiated by women workers in all spheres of their lives. This article shows women workers’ persistent efforts to reconstitute relations and spaces of belonging on their own terms to oppose injustices in the workplace and in South African society.