A seminar in the Labour Studies Seminar Series was presented by Ben Scully, entitled "The Councillor and the Commissioner: Job creation policy and citizenship rights in urban South Africa”
Speakers: Dr Ben Scully
Date: Wednesday, 22nd May 2019
Time: 4:15pm
Venue: Eden Grove Seminar Room 2
The series is run by the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU) and the Departments of Sociology and Industrial Sociology, History, and Economics & Economic History
THE SPEAKER: Ben Scully is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. His research focuses on labour, social welfare, and economic development in Africa, with a focus on South Africa. His articles have appeared in Theory and Society, Journal of Peasant Studies, Journal of Agrarian Change, Studies in Comparative International Development, Global Labour Journal, Review of African Political Economy, and The Journal of World Systems Research. He also serves as an editor of the Global Labour Journal.
THE PAPER: “Job creation” is a central focus of policy and political legitimacy in South Africa. “Jobs” in South African political rhetoric are associated with dignity and social inclusion. But most of the jobs created by government employment programmes are, in practice, short term, low paid, and precarious. In this paper, we use the images of “the councillor” and “the commissioner” to explore the complex relationship between citizenship rights and job creation policies. These are two different figures through which job programme beneficiaries encounter the state and contest their rights as citizens. These are metaphors for different and sometimes contradictory spaces of citizenship and inclusion. However, the two terms are also used literally, as ward councillors and labour commissioners are key players in the struggles that emerge around precarious work and citizenship in South Africa. Councillors are the elected representatives at the level of local government who play a central role in implementing the job creation policies of the state. Their closeness to the communities they represent makes them a symbol of the personalised, sometimes paternalistic relationship between the state and its most vulnerable citizens. Commissioners are the officials who adjudicate labour disputes in the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation, and Arbitration (CCMA), the central institution in South Africa’s industrial relations dispute resolution system. They represent the legal rights enshrined in the country’s constitution and labour legislation. Through a discussion of the conflicts that emerge in public construction projects, we show how these two spaces generate competing types of claims about the rights of citizenship in South Africa