Precarious and non-precarious work in the informal sector: Evidence from South Africa

Introduction

Precarious work is typically framed as work outside the legal definitions of a standardised employment relationship. This categorises all informal activities as precarious, which is not always the case, and limits the effectual analysis of specific precarious work practices in the underregulated global South where standardised labour regulations are largely ineffectual (Munck, 2013). However, a closer inspection of the characteristics of precarious work indicates that labour security is more than merely a legal category. It forms part of a general social concept that can define bimodal labour relations in terms of differential working practices, living conditions, local citizenships and interpersonal relationships. At the core of precarity is not a categorical checklist of legislative worker rights but a continuum of shifts in power relations between and within labour and capital (Kalleberg and Hewison, 2013). This study goes beyond the rigid legal confines of the formality/informality dialectic to analyse the social phenomena of precarious work and precarity operative within the informal sector. It explores the labour stratification of the informal sector, insurgent strategies and counter-conducts pursued by informal actors engaged in precarious work and revanchist strategies employed by informal workers to secure working conditions, to the detriment of precarious informal workers.

The research was conducted after the lengthy Covid-19 lockdown from 27 March until May 2020. During the initial shutdown period, no activities beyond the trade in basic foodstuffs, fuel, financial services and health and emergency services were permitted, and then only with the necessary permits (South African Government, 2020). These lockdown measures were also announced during a lengthy economic recession, caused by a combination of drought, divestment due to radical land reform proposals, extensive corruption and state capture, rolling energy blackouts, multiple state enterprise bankruptcies, the downgrading of the currency to junk status and record high unemployment rates.

The case study is the result of protracted structured interviews with 50 informal actors conducted three months into the lockdown in the Helderberg subregion of Cape Town. This region consists of a cluster of towns located at the far periphery of the City of Cape Town Metropolitan Municipality selected due to the strong links the researchers has with the community. Randomised convenience sampling of persons engaged in informal activities occurred in various public locations around supermarkets, public markets, paratransit taxi ranks, post offices and health clinics. The persons interviewed were specifically selected to represent a broad range of ethnicities, nationalities and the sexes. The interviews consisted of extended semi-structured interviews designed to ask non-specific, non-invasive open-ended questions regarding general employment, income and social conditions during the study period. However, the relaxed conversational nature of the interviews evoked several spontaneous voluntary responses from the respondents, providing answers going far beyond the scope of the original questions. The interviews were conducted in a variety of local and foreign languages through the assistance of an interpreter, although in most cases the respondents were conversant in English. The research occurred immediately after the most stringent lockdown restrictions had been relaxed, occurred with ethical clearance and followed approved research protocols and social-distancing measures.

Precarious work in the informal sector

Precarious work lacks a uniform definition in the literature but is typically associated with workers in flexible and pluralised underemployment, with low hourly incomes, deskilling, limited benefits and chronic job insecurity (Popov and Solovyov, 2019). Precarious work provides subsistence wages with continual employment uncertainties, a lack of labour bargaining, an absence of legal and social employment protections and stochastic incomes (Vosko, 2006). This is usually contrasted with the standard wage worker model of competitive salaried employment in a standardised employment relationship (SER), with attendant entitlements in terms of fixed salaries, social benefits and unemployment insurance. This legalist definition of precarisation is challenging as it only defines precarisation in relation to legal criteria in labour relations, limiting comparability between countries. Furthermore, it broadly categorises all work practices not governed by an SER as precarious, limiting the use of the concept beyond the global North.

Based on legalist definitions of precarious work, all informal or underregulated work practices are broadly assumed to be synonymous with precarious work, and all workers in the informal sector are considered job insecure with poor working conditions (Siegmann and Schiphorst, 2016: 115). However, this perspective is not representative of the range of experiences in the informal sector literature. Firstly, the informal economy is very heterogeneous in terms of activities, skills and incomes, and can be distinguished between precarious workers, necessity-driven into pursuing temporary, low-skill, low-income employment opportunities, and non-precarious self-employed and skilled workers, opportunity-driven to seek more remunerative and secure employment opportunities through the informal sector (Butler and Watt, 2007; Dibben et al., 2015; Phillips, 2011). Many workers consciously choose informal employment opportunities over waged income, particularly in small informal firms where workers have strong social relationships with employers, instead of an SER (Habib-Mintz, 2009). Secondly, this perspective obfuscates legitimate instances of exploitative and exclusionary practices within the informal sector, in which certain workers are placed in a state of precarity by other informal actors (Meagher, 2006; Phillips, 2011). In informality, there are significant instances of labour stratification and parallel working practices, with citizened workers, skilled workers and entrepreneurs experiencing conditions similar to an SER, whilst migrant and contract workers experience marginalisation, exploitative labour conditions and limited benefits.

In actuality, the concept of precarious work transcends mere legal definitions, denoting a fragility in social reproduction that has universal relevance in the global North and underregulated global South (Harris and Scully, 2015). Irrespective of whether workers are in an SER or not, aspects such as adequate incomes, adequate employment opportunities, access to niche markets, opportunities to gain and use skills, protection against arbitrary dismissal and collective representation are both embodied in legal and social contracts, and thus applicable in analysing precarisation in the informal sector and in underregulated labour markets of the global South (Mosoetsa et al., 2016: 7). More than ever, the concept of precarious work is linked to increasingly complex labour–labour relations and a new physiognomy of struggles within the labour environment (Hardt and Negri, 2009).

With weakening labour regulations and enforcement, and the growth of subcontracting and temporary labour practices, the distinctions between SER and non-SER, and between formal and informal employment, are becoming increasingly ambiguous (Kalleberg and Hewison, 2013). Nor is there always a clear social advantage to minimum-wage formal employment vis-à-vis informal self-employment, due to the lack of adequate labour laws and social protection in many countries. In the underregulated global South, precarity is not as much concerned with job quality and job security, as it is with political power relations and social reproduction. Hence, specific labour policies and social conventions are enacted to preferentially absorb the labour of certain informal sector workers, particularly citizens and long-standing residents, over that of non-propertied actors, ¹ recent migrants and foreigners (Lee and Kofman, 2012). In these cases, precarisation is strongly linked to a lack of social protection mechanisms and the social safety nets normally provided by community-based organisations.

In South Africa, as elsewhere in the subcontinent, the labour market is differentiated into formally employed workers in standardised employment relationships, informally or temporarily employed workers and non-waged actors subsisting on state grants, pensions and informal rents from state housing and shack rentals (Lee and Kofman, 2012). Informal work is not necessarily precarious, with many informal actors achieving relatively good incomes and adequate employment, acquiring specialised skills in niche markets and some form of collective representation within the community (Pulignano, 2018). However, due to high crime rates, high transportation costs, dysfunctional financial markets, a lack of capital and the apartheid-era legacies of spatial dislocation from markets, even obtaining informal employment has become a difficult prospect for many in South Africa (Burger and Fourie, 2019). As a result, precarious practices generally occur in the absence of labour legislation over informal hiring practices, in which the large supply of temporary, unregistered and often illegal labour creates precarious employment opportunities with limited benefits, upskilling or continued employment. This disproportionately affects those on the margins, particularly foreigners, ethnic minorities and recent in-migrants without suitable local social connections (Mosoetsa et al., 2016).

Precarity as a process of social exclusion

Underlying the various definitions of precarious work is precarity, the state of being socially marginalised outside the means of collective organisation, through which unfavourable work practices can be collectively resisted and negotiated. Precarity is a double entitlement failure, not merely meaning chronic work instability and insecurity, but also a lack of local citizenship, status and social benefits within the community (Kalleberg and Hewison, 2013). The precariat are defined as persons in flexploitative labour contracts, with no occupational identity or benefits, deprivation and social alienation. They include both economically immobile locals and immigrants (Standing, 2014). The precariat and precarity are linked to three specific marginalisations: a lack of an adequate means to labour and work, a lack of social benefits and a lack of citizenship rights (Standing, 2018). The challenge of precarity is that these marginalisations shift the economic risks of labour away from capital towards the precariat, whilst removing the social benefits and statutory entitlements associated with standardised labour relations (Vosko, 2010). This definition transcends the limitations of SER and non-SER categories. Precarity reduces wages, creates job insecurity and reduces the capacity of workers to organise politically amongst themselves (Manolchev, 2020). Moreover, this alters the dialectical power relationship away from a dialectical tension between capital and labour, to a dialectical tension between precarious and non-precarious workers in a stratified labour force (Vallas and Prener, 2012). In this situation, precarious workers seek insecure forms of employment in an ‘underclass’ status, even if this relationship is heavily disadvantageous, whilst other workers seek to maintain preferential employment opportunities and benefits (Žižek, 2012).

In both SERs and non-SERs, labour security is achieved through associational membership in political and social organisations such as unions, trade associations and community organisations. These organisations enable their members to collectively demand better incomes, more benefits, political advocacy and improved living conditions (Silver, 2003). Citizenship is an important aspect of this relationship, since ethnicity and residency determine the degree of membership and confer specific civil, political and social rights-based claims to citizened workers (Holston, 2011). Citizenship entitles the actor to standardised employment relationships, minimum wages and social services, but citizenship is also linked to socially defined entitlements, often independent of or in abeyance of the legal labour codes (Millstein, 2017). Citizenship is also associated with non-waged income sources, supplementing informal incomes and enabling certain actors to periodically exit the labour force when informal labour opportunities become unfavourable (Zhan and Huang, 2013).

Labour stratification and precarity in the informal sector can be linked to disjunctions in citizenship, with long-standing residents and local homeowners enjoying specialised treatment and exclusive inclusions not afforded to recent migrants (Isin and Turner, 2007). For informal actors, the citizenship of the state and society is disjuncted because it is not enmeshed in a unitary, cohesive nation-society entity, but in a deeply fragmented polity of overlapping special interests (Ranganathan, 2014). Labour bimobility can thus proceed both upwards when informal actors collectively bargain to achieve greater gains from formal capital in the form of SER, and downwards when members of these social organisations generate collective securities through exclusionary practices, enabling in-group members to improve wages and working conditions, and leaving the more undesirable work opportunities for precarious workers. In this way, certain groups of actors employ political subjectification to exercise control over the non-citizened population (Arnold and Bongiovi, 2013).

Thus, precarity can also be defined in terms of ethnic and class relations as a specific class or in-group exercising social and economic control over the income and benefits of others (Wright, 2016). Precarious work is not merely a new mode of employment characteristic of late capitalism. It can also refer to an emerging ‘subclass’ of precarious actors unable to integrate within an SER or attain local citizenship (Standing, 2011). However, the use of the term ‘underclass’ should be used advisedly since the precarious worker is also heterogeneous, segregated in different occupations and social and ethnic divisions, and thus cannot be considered as a cohesive underclass. Precarious workers do not experience the deindividualisation and collective identity that occurs with class formation, with the precariat aspiring to attain membership in the same organisations that marginalise them, as well as competing with other precarious workers for the same income opportunities (Manolchev et al., 2021). Moreover, these same in-group structures can be used to place certain actors into a position of Bourdieuvian flexploitation, a one-sided flexible employment relationship. These relationships are particularly evident in ethnic immigrant in-groups, since their common social and economic marginalisation means that they are a captive market for exploitative practices. However, precarious workers willingly acquiesce to these flexploitative practices, since membership gives precarious workers a marginal form of subsistence and a sense of citizenship, albeit a very tenuous citizenship (Bourdieu, 1997; Suliman and Weber, 2019).

Counter-conduct in informal precarious work

Yet, in many instances, the growing precariousness in certain informal work practices also leads to modes of counter-conduct and cross-citizenship-based resistance (Lee and Kofman, 2012). Counter-conduct is not an outright revolt, insurrection or disobedience, but a deviation from accepted modes of conduct to transform the standard strategies, techniques and power relationships in established modes of conduct (Death, 2016; Foucault, 2007). Counter-conduct is directed against the conducts of governmentality, that is the ensemble of local institutions and procedures representing markets, political sovereignty and social discrimination. This results in complex realisations of different sets of powers in the urban space (Foucault, 1991). However, counter-conduct also emerges from within the dominant mode of conduct, strengthening the role of governmentality but also alternating it to serve the actor by reorienting the power relationships within governmentality (Bulley, 2016). This is because counter-conduct is not a purely negative act of rebellion against power but a resistance to the egregious aspects of power to alter the perspective of what is normative conduct in an ethical–political sense (Foucault, 2007). Counter-conduct is generally inwardly focused on the self-governance of conduct to free the actor from the oppressiveness of certain conducts and to reposition the actor within modes of governmentality (Binkley and Cruikshank, 2016).

Informality is an insurgent mode of counter-conduct because it avoids formal laws and regulations (Devlin, 2011). Informality is extra-legal because it is technically in abeyance of established laws and policies in a de jure sense, but it is also the de facto mode of conduct by social convention (Geyer and Geyer, 2014). Precarious workers rely on various extra-legal practices with different legitimacies and illegitimacies in terms of labour regulatory policies (Kanbur, 2009). Through various insurgent practices of regulation evasion and boundary-blurring, the informal actor creates modes of counter-conduct to challenge hegemonic social conventions (Rosol, 2014). By operating partially inside and partially outside the governmentality of formally recognised by-laws and policies, these counter-conducts serve as forms of political resistance to domineering formal modes of conduct (Geyer, 2021; Yiftachel, 2009). While governmentality generates political adversity and compels compliance to certain modes of conduct, the influence of governmentality is also limited, beyond which the actor becomes free to engage in contrary modes of conduct (Barrett, 2020).

However, informality tends to be biased towards patrimonies and clientelism exclusive to certain community and social networks (Dibben et al., 2015). This enables secure forms of informal occupations through the voluntary market exit of skilled formal workers into stable informal self-employment. But it also produces informal labour stratification through double market exclusions, both exclusions from formal employment in a standardised employment relationship and exclusion from the more remunerative sectors of the informal economy through exclusivist social conduct towards citizened members (Khamis, 2012). This generates the more prevalent precarious work opportunities in informality.

The precarisation of informality during the lockdown

The interviews indicated that the combination of a severe economic recession and informal trade restrictions during the initial Covid-19 lockdown in April 2020 resulted in a reset of the usual trade relations between the formal and informal sectors. As the formal sector, upon which the informal sector is largely dependent for its cashflow and clientele, stopped trading, incomes in the informal economy steeply declined. During this period, the informal sector scaled back its consumption and level of activity as almost all households interviewed lost one or two income streams and experienced a significant reduction in aggregated household income. The informal economy shifted from being primarily dependent on marginal wage and contract opportunities to being dependent on the spending of state welfare grants and secondary incomes generated within the community.

The reset in the informal economy resulted in the radical reconfiguration of practices, actor relationships and spatial representations in an uncertain social and economic environment (Simone, 2004). During the crisis, a new dialectical relationship emerged between certain long-time resident South Africans whose households were securely informalised with a diverse portfolio of informal and non-waged income opportunities, and a new precariat ‘underclass’ of non-propertied workers, recent migrants and immigrant workers who did not benefit from these schemes. The crisis not only highlighted labour stratification in the informal sector between citizened informal workers and those informal workers pursuing precarious work strategies, but also revealed how the resultant counter-conducts by precarious workers resulted in a reset in the notions of citizenship within the community. Not only did it stretch the micropolitical hegemonic relations to extreme instances of violence, but it also resulted in the undermining and restructuring of these relations.

Buffered by temporary increases in pensions and grants and the new addition of unemployment insurance, as well as benefitting from the informal backyard rents of shacks erected around subsidised state housing, long-resident South African households tended to be better off than non-propertied actors, recent migrants and immigrants during the lockdown. Since these households often had access to a diversity of income sources throughout the lockdown, they tended to be more economically resilient. Homeownership of state housing provided them with secondary incomes, security of tenure and citizenship within the community. The most important secondary income sources were old-age grants, providing approximately R1900 (US$120) per month; child grants, providing approximately R800 (US$50) per month; and the newly created unemployment insurance, providing approximately R350 (US$22) per month. In most cases, these were supplemented by rents from informal backyard rooms or shops erected around people’s state-assisted housing, providing approximately R400–R500 rental (US$25–32) per unit. Many landlords erected up to four units per plot. Whilst these incomes seem exceedingly low, the high rate of unemployment reduced the perception of a living wage in the informal sector. Off-hand responses indicated that a household could easily survive on an income of approximately R1600 (US$100) per month, with certain households subsisting on as little as R800 (US$50). Aggregated within an extended household, secondary income sources, combined with one or two family members in formal and informal employment, generated a secure level of remuneration far above that of other informal actors.

On the other hand, most of those who were previously formally employed with stable incomes became precaritised through the loss of formal employment or stable incomes. Immigrants, the majority of whom were Zimbabweans and Somalis, non-propertied actors without rental incomes and recent South African in-migrants without access to formal employment, state housing, services or grants, or without local family networks, were far more vulnerable than long-resident citizens, and thus can be designated as precarious. These were previously employed as informal contract and casual workers in the remunerative construction, domestic and retail industries. With the steep contraction and the retreat of the formal economy, trading fresh fruits, vegetables and eggs became the dominant mode of subsistence for the precariat at the beginning of the lockdown. Formerly, this trade was the most socially eschewed activity, barely sufficient to provide shelter, food and transport, previously only generating approximately R1600 (US$100) per month before the lockdown, and thus had a high market exit rate. It was also a forbidden practice since the autochthonous local social regulations only permitted long-established enterprises to trade in these goods.

These socially illicit trades were initially relatively profitable because, during the lockdown, most supermarkets had very long queues of between one and four hours but fresh produce was abundantly available from local wholesalers and farmers. However, as the lockdown restrictions lifted, trading food became less profitable, so an informal trader generating R400–R800 (US$25–50) a week during the level 5 lockdown often only generated R200 (US$13) a week after the easing of restrictions. Precarious workers soon diversified into trading clothing for the upcoming winter, the trade of which was restricted during the level 5 lockdown, and later trading new clothing, fast food, prepaid data cards, traditional medicines, sweets, firewood and cosmetics. Consequently, the informal markets became a hive of activity around the 25th of the month when salaries are paid, during the 2nd of the month when government pensions and unemployment checks are paid and on the 6th of the month when child grants are paid. During this period, precarious workers without access to capital frantically scrambled to acquire stock from the previous day’s earnings, often departing at 3 a.m. for the distant city CBD to queue to buy stock in the city when wholesalers opened at 7 a.m., only to return to the market and open up a stand selling goods from 9 a.m. until late in the evening.

To achieve a sense of security, it was essential for precarious informal actors to maintain liquidity by constantly saving working capital and acquiring sufficient business stock. Generally, households invested all available monies into business capital, reserving nothing for future food needs or rents, since myopic consumption would mean becoming destitute. In the process, actors would often sell any household item except the necessary cell phones and vehicles and forgo one or two meals a day. As one respondent stated, ‘We save all our money for [business] stock, it is better to starve with stock than to starve without it. We sold our washing machine for money for the business’. Whatever money was saved determined the level of business capital, and hence future income. Households that acquired relatively high amounts of capital, such as those with significant secondary incomes, tended to acquire more profitable stock, and thus outperformed those with less business capital.

However, there was almost no minimum remuneration for market exit. This is because, in the recession, any activity that would provide an additional measure of household income for subsistence was pursued. Adverse incorporation often occurred as certain citizened actors with access to additional business capital or vehicles would employ precarious workers as street traders at bare subsistence wages (Theodore et al., 2017). However, this exploitation was readily accepted by the precariat with no other means of income. Informal activities tend to be more exploitative than facilitative, less willing to provide credit, information or support and highly preferential to race and ethnicity. This can be understood because the competitive nature of easy-entry, low-returns enterprises requires a certain ruthlessness.

Counter-conduct and insurgent modes of informality during the lockdown

A complex set of rights, moralities and rationalities underpin informal practices (Holston, 2009). The terrain became murkier due to the emergency lockdown regulations, as there was no clear delineation of what is a normative right, morality or rationality in terms of informal trading. This is particularly problematic in South Africa, where deep differences in the interpretation of rights, moralities and rationalities existed prior to the crisis (Watson, 2003). The degree of counter-conduct to what was perceived as oppressive lockdown restrictions differed according to the level of enforcement of regulations. Overall, there was a marked acquiescence of township residents to the lockdown regulations outside the township, evident in the widespread use of masks and sanitisers in informal enterprises operating outside the townships. However, within the townships, all health and safety restrictions were flagrantly ignored, with one interviewee stating that ‘As hulle my spek hap gaan ek hulle spek gee, die is ons plek die’ (If they talk bacon [talk of trouble] I’m going to give them bacon, this here’s our place.) During the month-long interview period, only three persons were observed wearing masks in the township.

In many situations, the actor was not able to fully comply with all the temporary lockdown regulations, either because the specific regulation prohibits or restricts the activity, or because it places costly and onerous conditions on continuing it. In these cases, the actor resorted to a range of insurgencies and counter-conducts, operating in grey areas of the law based on the assumption that law enforcement is arbitrary and given to corruption (Amin and Cirolia, 2018). During the lockdown, this often meant concealing the true intent of the business with a skein of legitimacy, appearing to be conforming to regulations whilst covertly continuing prohibited business operations (Welter and Smallbone, 2011). It included reclassifying the type of enterprise to essential services whilst continuing the primary occupation of the business, and/or the falsification of licences and papers. Similarly, actors would use alternative roads and ‘funeral attendance certificates’ to overcome local travel restrictions. One respondent stated: ‘I sold toys and books [not permitted during the level 4 lockdown] as “educational” items’. In most cases, any product was available upon request, hidden behind the counter or behind red barricade tape to indicate that the goods are not ‘officially’ for sale. In this way, counter-conduct was masked behind everyday social practices to make it illegible to the state (Simone, 2004). Much informal insurgency was merely filling in gaps in formal institutional arrangements as a result of lockdown institutional collapse. Not only did it create market opportunities for restricted goods such as alcohol or tobacco, but it also created new markets for temporarily scarce essential basic goods such as baby milk formula, toilet paper and non-prescription medicine.

Most of the counter-conducts observed were social, finding ways to circumvent the strict social conventions linked to citizenship, regarding what goods may be sold by whom and where in townships. In the community, traditional non-competition social conventions only allowed those with local citizenship, that is, long-established Xhosa and Somali members of the local business forum, to trade in basic necessities in the townships. Recent in-migrant South Africans and immigrants were historically only permitted to trade in second-hand goods and traditional foods then unavailable due to Covid-19 transport restrictions. However, because ‘the [local informal] spaza shops are selling [basic goods] at [speculative] Covid prices’, that is 30–50% above normal retail prices, migrant street traders started trading basic necessities in the streets at significantly lower prices. By becoming insurgent, these modes of counter-conduct indirectly challenged the adverse notions of citizenship in the community (Meagher and Lindell, 2013).

In response, certain informal shop owners resorted to revanchist strategies, giving gangs of unemployed youth permission to rob any ‘illegal’ street trader of money and goods, without the usual threat of street justice. The challenge was that the opportunistic improvisations of precariat petty traders reduced the necessary incomes of well-established informal shop owners. As one respondent stated, ‘They [anonymous persons] send boys to rob us of our stock and money where we are. They took my money and eggs even in town. Later when they don’t get the money they break into our houses’. Yet precarious workers continued to trade prohibited goods because, at the bottom of the economy, any loss of income might mean one fewer meal or the loss of rent. The city in crisis became a space of need for the precariat and space for exploitation by citizens because to survive in times of desperation means to exploit others. Yet, despite the perceived racial nature of attacks on immigrant traders, immigrants do not regard them as xenophobic but as symptomatic of necessity-driven activities, even under the guise of xenophobia (in the case of youth gangs), under the guise of law enforcement corruption (in the case of illegal confiscation and resale of grey goods) or under the guise of charity (in the case of the misallocation, skimming and selective distribution of government food aid parcels).

Certain counter-conducts served to destabilise the hegemonies in the parallel workforce binary. Certain prominent Xhosa community members such as landlords and taxi owners protected the immigrants’ trading activities as a means of ensuring their rents were paid. Going against the wishes of fellow Xhosa spaza shop owners implies that during the crisis the precarisation is giving way to fluid relationship-based networks based on economics, not ethnicity. Despite the threat of punishment and theft, street traders continued to trade informally, operating in a living dialogue with the social system, trying to negotiate where and how transactions can occur (Roy, 2003). In other instances, traders operated in blatant contradiction to social conventions by becoming hypermobile, resorting to a cat-and-mouse game of evading the gangs through mobile house-to-house trade. Those with the lowest incomes armed themselves, confident that their very low revenues and the threat of physical violence reasonably safeguarded them from theft. One respondent stated: ‘I don’t care about them, I also carry the knife and I have nothing [to steal]’.

This power/resistance binary results in institutional changes which become permanent over time (Kalantaridis, 2007). An example of this was the spontaneous emergence of a designated free-trade zone in the township, where any person could trade any type of product without social regulation or law enforcement. This zone emerged just outside the township along an undevelopable canal servitude adjacent to the major local shopping centre. Because it was located in a public area, it was outside the purview of local landowners who normally prohibit such activities, and it was located close enough to the township to dissuade the government authorities from actively regulating these activities. Here, traders of different ethnicities, nationalities and even races traded freely without municipal trade permits or any of the usual social trading permissions, since local civic organisations do not govern spaces outside the township. In contrast to most other trading areas, this free-trade zone did not have predesignated spots for specific traders, since the canal forms a common pedestrian corridor between the shopping centre and the township. Spots were allocated on a first-come, first-served basis, with the only social requirement being that the regular traders required all traders to leave the area free of litter at the end of the day. This is an example of the development of counter-spaces, spaces formed at the intersections of powers and practices (Lindell et al., 2019). Here, insurgency achieved the right to a free social space and a measure of spatial justice for the precariat by locating in areas with dubious ownership claims. Because the servitude has no economic value, is located outside the territory of civic organisations and is prone to flooding in the winter, it is of no interest to anyone except precarious workers.

Dislocated citizenship as a counter-conduct

These insurgent informalities are not a subaltern politic of protest, but of redress, as precariat actors bend the rules to supply their basic material needs (Lindell, 2010). However, this indirectly transformed the social hegemonies of local citizenship in the process. Holston (2009) introduces the idea of citizenship as a hybridity of entrenchment and insurgency, where the sense of belonging to a specific place is partly inherited and partly earned. While traditional notions of citizenship are linked to autochthony, the inherited rights to place given through social conventions, in practice it is also earned, to the degree that the precariat actor contributes to the welfare of the collective (Hilgers, 2011). Since citizenship is linked to a range of economic rights and freedoms, insurgent informal practices provide the financial means to gain citizenship and the right to belong, by paying rent and shopping locally (Monson, 2015). The informal actor, irrespective of ethnicity, is tolerated by other actors because they derive some pecuniary or utility benefit due to the presence of the actor, providing a certain type of good or service, and in turn consuming someone else’s good or service. Thus, informal activities generate a sense of belonging and thus citizenship becomes enmeshed in the realpolitik of place (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2000).

The degree of citizenship attained by the precariat actor in the local depends on mobility and networking, regardless of nationality or legal status. Almost all businesses used social media on mobile phones, and many informal actors conducted mobile petty trade by foot, in contradiction to the stay-at-home curfew. Those few actors with vehicles became hypermobile and became essential middlemen, operating with higher margins than ordinary street traders, and thus achieved a measure of citizenship because they provided essential services to the community. Those few actors without these resources were unable to do any business except street trading and day labour, and thus became dislocated, persons without citizenship. The loss of employment dislocated the actor from active citizenship within the place, due to the loss of utility to others (Meth, 2010). The lack of income not only affects subsistence but also dislocates the actor from his or her residence, as the (former?) home becomes a place of antagonism due to the non-payment of rent.

Other modes of citizenship included precarious work within in-group networks. These tended to be the most exploitative practices, with the lowest wages. Certain traders would buy vegetables and eggs wholesale, and subcontract the sale of these goods to precarious mobile traders at great personal risk of theft and very low revenues. In the growing informal delivery industry, immigrant contractors with delivery contracts would retain the most lucrative concentrated delivery points for themselves and subcontract far outlying contracts to in-group members for a marginal share of the revenues. Even though these practices constitute both flexploitation and self-exploitation, precarious workers willingly acquiesce to these flexploitative practices, since membership gives precarious workers a marginal form of subsistence and a tenuous, limited sense of citizenship.

Nowhere is the dislocated citizenship more apparent than in the one burning question always posed as a greeting: ‘Uvelaphi?’ (Where are you from?). Prior to the crisis, this form of greeting was generally intended as a conversation starter and to create rapport between actors, and a sense of common citizenship. However, during the crisis, it became a judgement and sentence which implies ‘Why are you here? What right do you have to be here?’ For recent in-migrants and immigrants, this crystallises the sense of dislocated citizenship, the anomie of being alien. They are precariously trying to earn a livelihood during the crisis without legal entitlements, but also attempting to attain local citizenship based on cultural legacies (for instance, Zimbabwean Ndebeles prefer to be called Zulu based on shared Nguni heritage with local Xhosas). They are trying to escape the everyday stigma of being a dislocated outsider in a new location, but also have limited means to attain local citizenship or secure employment and stable incomes.

However, these processes served to break down the sense of local citizenship or ethnic consciousness prevalent in local hegemonies. Social networking often dislocated the once-strong ethnic ties within communities, since such ties necessarily require social obligations between actors in the form of gifting and loans. Rather, actors increasingly sought out weak ties across ethnic boundaries that could enable economic transactions requiring a minimal level of obligations. Similarly, landlords often negotiated delayed payments on rent for immigrants, in some cases even providing food until the end of the lockdown, even though they often depended on these rents as their only source of income. This was due to the perception that immigrant renters were more trustworthy and better-paying tenants than native South Africans, and thus their rental incomes were tied to the well-being of these immigrants. Somali spaza shop owners also regularly provided some credit to local clients and ran local soup kitchens to ensure continued goodwill among the community, despite often being on the receiving end of xenophobic attacks in the past.

Conclusion

The research analysed precarious work practices within the informal sector during the Covid-19 lockdown in South Africa, as well as the emergence of insurgent strategies, differential citizenships and forms of counter-conduct pursued by informal precarious workers during the lengthy shutdown. The literature indicated that while precarious work is usually legally defined in terms of a standardised employment relationship, this obscures the social aspects of precarisation operative within the informal sector and in the global South. In the informal sector, precarious and non-precarious work is associated with a bimodality in informal incomes, social marginalisation outside collective bargaining, unfavourable work practices and revanchist methods to control incomes within the sector. Similarly, precarious and non-precarious work is also linked to differential citizenship, where precarisation and labour security is differentiated through community-defined rights and entitlements. This shifts the dialectical power relationship away from capital and labour to an internal competition between precarious and non-precarious workers in the informal sector. Precarity, however, also creates opportunities for insurgent modes of counter-conduct in the interstices of oppressive regulations and social conventions, both freeing the actor from oppressive modes of governmentality, and reorienting normative conduct.

The research indicated that during the collapse of the formal economy, and a shift to relying on state welfare grants and secondary incomes from informal rents and incomes, a new dialectical relationship developed between certain citizened South Africans and a new precariat in-group of recent migrant and immigrant workers. Long-resident South African households with a diversity of formal, informal and non-waged income opportunities became relatively secure, and thus exited precarity. Precarious informal workers, without the attendant rights and securities, shifted to the illicit trade in basic necessities. This depended on constantly maintaining capital and business stock even if it meant eating fewer meals, working long hours or selling household goods. This is also involved engaging in precarious activities since informal regulations prohibit the sale of certain goods by non-citizened workers.

The lockdown regulations created significant insecurities since there was no clear definition of normative rights and morality in informal trading. Since informal activities are necessary for subsistence, this resulted in modes of counter-conduct where the true intent of the enterprise was concealed from authorities, evading lockdown restrictions by reclassifying the type of enterprise, falsifying permits and licences and using mobile strategies to trade in essential basic goods and services. It also involved achieving hypermobility by conducting informal activities on the move to avoid local gangs and authorities. Most of the counter-conducts were social, circumventing strict informal social conventions linked to citizenship, regarding what goods may be sold by whom and where in townships. This involved precariat workers working under the protection of local landlords or evading local gangs and threats of violence through hypermobility.

However, the crisis also resulted in several oppressive conducts such as ethnic in-group flexploitation as precarious workers employed precariat labour at bare subsistence wages. It also resulted in revanchist strategies of protecting the incomes of local informal enterprises from precariat workers by using criminal gangs to victimise precarious workers. However, certain counter-conducts also served to destabilise the longstanding hegemonies in the informal sector. The once-strong social barriers in the community eroded as citizenship no longer became solely defined in terms of ethnic categories but in terms of weak economic ties. Citizenship was no longer just defined by ethnicity but also by the mutual dependence on intra-local trade, and thus buying and selling within the community was a pathway to citizenship. Citizenship was also achieved through social utility in terms of providing vehicles or business networks for trade with the minimum level of social obligations. This eroded ethnic-based citizenship, with local taxi operators protecting precariat workers and landlords accepting delayed payments for rent and food.

One of the most interesting examples of the decline of citizen-based social conventions was the development of a free-trade zone counter-space open for traders of any ethnicity or race on public land outside the township. Since this space is on public land outside the township on the boundary of formal developments, it was free from authority, both from the township and the state. This was a socially regulated space in the intersection of different powers and practices, in which insurgency created spatial justice for the precariat.