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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how chronically unemployed youth in Johannesburg hunt for formal jobs while holding little hope for future employment. Rather, they approach their indefinite job search as a present-oriented activity that affords belonging, resources, and gendered affirmation while carried out.

Paper long abstract

In inner-city Johannesburg, work seekers without the professional experience, qualifications, or financial means to land stable employment nonetheless spend years, if not decades, searching for ‘proper jobs’ in South Africa’s exclusionary formal economy. These chronic work seekers pay daily visits to formalised labour agencies and recruitment services. Yet, they hold little hope that these market intermediaries will ever award them the 'proper jobs' they apply for and express only vague aspirations towards a future of employment. While work-seeking is usually understood as a transitional, aspirational activity aimed at future job-attainment, chronically unemployed youth instead approach their job search as a primarily present-oriented project that affords them favourable forms of spatial and social belonging, provisional access to socio-material resources, and for unemployed young men, gendered affirmation as ‘masculine working men’. Thus, work seekers keep applying for high-competition, high-status jobs, not in some ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant, 2011) that they might arrive at a ‘fantasy future’ (Bear, 2017) of stable employment and socioeconomic mobility, but with the acute awareness that formalised job-seeking might be the only 'proper work' they can access in the foreseeable future.

Building on two periods of ethnographic fieldwork in Johannesburg in 2022 and 2024, this paper therefore suggests that work-seeking must be understood as more than an aspirational activity done in the hopes of future market incorporation. At the peripheries of the labour market, ‘hopeless’ jobseekers craft work-seeking lives they understand as good, meaningful, and ‘decent' working lives, even as they remain excluded from ‘decent jobs’.