Paper short abstract:

Public work programmes were long preferred to cash “handouts” by the state for promoting “dignity through work” for South Africa’s unemployed. But premising material and social incorporation on work engenders contestations about value that underpin the negotiation of state-society relations.

Paper long abstract:

An enduring ideological battle in post-apartheid South Africa concerns the terms upon which the country’s many unemployed should be offered material and social incorporation. Policymakers long preferred public work programmes to unconditional transfers for ensuring reciprocity and promoting “dignity” through work. But premising incorporation upon work engenders contestations about the value of work and the people who complete it.

This paper investigates such contestations within the Community Work Programme (CWP) based on interviews and ethnographic data. Distanced from the local determination and performance of “useful work” in this scheme, bureaucrats struggle to ascertain the work completed and to reckon its value – without output, the programme reduces to an “expensive social grant”. Unionisers counter with a two-fold argument. Insisting on the completion of useful work “every day”, they demand more workdays and payment increases. Threatening to withhold the voting power of participants if demands remain unmet, they cast participants as valuable not merely to the state’s developmental objectives but to the ruling ANC and its ambitions to remain in power. Meanwhile, participants experience both structural and subjective devaluation. Their work – already delinked from pathways into secure livelihoods apparently enjoyed by municipal counterparts – is additionally shaped by a felt lack of respect by local officials and residents.

These contestations illuminate the conflictual negotiation of incorporation through value systems centred on work. Unionisers affirm reciprocity requirements in state-society relations by insisting on the value of CWP work, even as participants contend with its ever-delayed promise: of material and social recognition.