NEIL AGGETT LABOUR STUDIES UNIT (NALSU): Labour Studies Seminar Series, Rhodes University, South Africa
SEMINAR / WEBINAR: 4PM, Wednesday 22 April 2026, Steve Biko Room (Sociology Department), Rhodes University, & via Zoom (details below)
SPEAKER AND TOPIC: Anele Dloto, University of Fort Hare, "Informal Construction Labour and the Meanings of Skill: Roadside Hiring in Buffalo City, South Africa"
THE PAPER: Anele Dloto examines how skill becomes meaningful and consequential in Buffalo City's informal construction labour market. Focusing on roadside hiring encounters, his paper analyses these intensified moments of judgement: decisions must be made quickly, with limited information, and without formal screening mechanisms. Drawing on ethnographic research, the study shows that skill is neither absent, nor formally stabilised in this labour market, but actively produced as a negotiated and relational judgement. Workers actively assert skill through fleeting roadside encounters, reputations, repeated hiring, and demonstrations of reliability over time. Employers recognise competence, which they need to manage risk and complete work, but resist credentialed forms of recognition that would strengthen workers' bargaining power.
Skill is recognised, contested, and negotiated in informal labour markets, and worker agency is crucial to how workers navigate exclusion, assert their skills, and resist the precarious conditions they face. By reframing skill as a situated social judgement shaped by uncertainty, interests, and unequal power, the paper shows that informality does not flatten skill, but relocates its production into everyday interactions. This analysis challenges human capital approaches that treat skill as an individual attribute awaiting credentialed recognition, and informality perspectives that argue that labour surpluses render workers interchangeable. By offering a clearer explanation of how skill and inequality are reproduced in informal labour markets, this paper helps explain why policy efforts centred on training and credentialing often fail.
SPEAKER: Mr Anele Dloto is a PhD Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand and Sociology Lecturer at the University of Fort Hare. His research examines the social construction of skill within informal labour markets, with a particular focus on roadside hiring sites in Buffalo City's informal construction economy.
ONLINE: Register in advance at https://tinyurl.com/3nyy7pbt (you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining).
ALL WELCOME. LIGHT SNACKS PROVIDED.
HOSTS: Based in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, NALSU is engaged in policy, research and workers' education, has a democratic, non-sectarian, non-aligned and pluralist practice, and active relations with a range of advocacy, labour and research organisations. We are named in honour of Dr Neil Hudson Aggett, union organiser and medical doctor who died in 1982 in an apartheid jail after enduring brutality and torture.