Paper short abstract:

Pretoria’s white working class has lost out since the end of apartheid. They generate their own small enterprises and complain about cut-throat competition in South Africa’s neoliberal economy. But their responses to current economic uncertainty retain the capacity for mutual assistance and solidarity.

Paper long abstract:

Unemployment and poverty in post-apartheid South Africa follow the contours not just of race, but also of class. Here I deal with the new 'poor whites' in Pretoria which had a substantial white working class during apartheid.

They were given preferential employment in the heavy industries - iron and steel, armaments and munitions - of West Pretoria. These depended on state support and the country's pariah status. When South Africa joined the global economy in the 1990s, many were shut down, leading to mass retrenchment of white workers. Other large industries have grown up since then, but new codes of employment equity and redress make it hard for white jobseekers. Black empowerment of this kind was one way national and international capital forestalled more radical economic restructuring after apartheid.

Capital - still predominantly white - benefits substantially, but white ex-workers are paying the price. They turn mainly to their own small enterprises, often blurring the boundary between formal and informal sectors. This paper draws on my field research on who starts these enterprises, who works in them, and who fails to find employment there.

Many of my informants say of the post-apartheid period 'we have all become individuals here'. They contrast today's cut-throat competition unfavourably with white, working-class solidarity before. The dog-eat-dog conditions they complain about, however, are tempered by new forms of mutual assistance.

Pretoria's white working class has not yet lost all sources of solidarity and this makes their responses to current economic uncertainties worth examining.