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Paper short abstract

Formalised employment brokers in Johannesburg mediate access to scarce formal jobs. As employment remains inaccessible to the majority, however, these intermediary institutions come to mainly mediate access to valued work-identities, communities, and masculinities, rather than concrete employment.

Paper long abstract

Representing official points of connection between the underemployed urban poor and the formal labour market, formalised labour brokers in inner-city Johannesburg mediate access to the minuscule pool of ‘proper’, stable employment in South Africa’s acutely segmented and exclusionary formal economy. As the number of ‘discouraged work seekers’ - those who desire work but have ceased actively searching - continues to grow, an expanding web of institutional intermediaries has emerged to address the intertwined economic, political, and developmental 'crises' of structural joblessness. Because many services primarily serve a never-employed and formally unqualified userbase, work seekers often spend years frequenting the same intermediaries in a futile pursuit of favourable, 'proper' jobs. Keenly aware that never-employed work seekers are unlikely to become work-takers, institutional representatives and work seekers alike rearticulate the value and meaning of labour intermediation. Labour agencies come to be understood as sustained ‘workplaces’ in their own right, where distinctly professional and ‘proper’ work seekers perform socially valuable work-seeking work despite knowing it is unlikely to yield concrete employment. Rather than channels into the market, intermediary institutions become sites in which the permanently unemployed forge meaningful work(-seeking) lives, professional communities, and work-related forms of adult masculinity. Even discouraging ‘decent work seekers’ from accepting ‘indecent work’, brokers do not uncritically channel the unemployed into employment. Still shaped by apartheid’s long legacy of racialised labour governance, formalised work-seeking nevertheless organise and govern the urban poor in ways that entrench gendered, racist, and heterosexist understandings of what constitutes ‘proper work’ and ‘proper working men’.