Paper short abstract:

Drawing on debates about informal workers as 'surplus to requirements' or 'essential workers', a social reproduction lens will be used to examine the linkages of African informal workers into circuits of capital, and the use of social protection narratives to stabilize precarious forms of inclusion.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will draw on the insights of social reproduction perspectives on informal work to examine the ways in which African informal workers have been linked into circuits of capital, and how social protection narratives have been deployed to normalize and stabilize the expansion of precarious work in Africa. Drawing on debates about whether informal workers are 'surplus to requirements', or 'essential workers', this paper will examine how linkages and narratives from the sphere of social reproduction are used to expand 'disguised employment' of informal and precarious workers in a range of modern capitalist sectors. Evidence from Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa will be used to explore the extent of incorporation of precarious workers into sectors associated with modernization and structural transformation, and the intense levels of exploitation facilitated by these processes. The social protection and 'essential worker' narratives arising from the pandemic will be interrogated as a means of further normalizing rather than challenging the expansion of precarious work in Africa and beyond. The paper will reflect on how celebratory and 'caring' narratives of informal and precarious work shift the focus of crisis from the incorporation of precarious workers into the formal circuits of capital, to the lack of minimalist social protection to ensure the viability of these arrangements. Reflection on social protection strategies of decommodification, depoliticization and financialization will refocus attention on what social reproduction thinking can tell us about progressive approaches to the crisis of work that focus on promoting decent work rather than stabilizing precarious work.