Power and Classification: Casual Workers Struggles in the South African Post Office

David Dickinson

Jennifer Chung’s (2009) important study illustrates how marginalised workers mobilised symbolic power in their struggles for better pay and conditions in the US and South Korea. Chung uses Bourdieu’s understanding of symbolic power as ‘one of the most fundamental mechanisms of change in the social world.’ Central to the disputes she describes were ‘classification struggles’ in which the legitimacy of the triangular employment relationship, created by the introduction of labour brokers, was challenged: workers demanded to be legally classified as employees of the client company, not of the labour broker. Labour broking separates the de jure and de facto employer, usually to the disadvantage of workers. Chung places emphasis on the ability of the precarious workers to shame their de facto employer by making visible the conditions under which they worked.

Labour broker employees or ‘casuals’ in the South African Post Office (SAPO) engaged in their own struggles against exploitation (Dickinson 2015). Organised into workers committees they successfully challenged labour broking. After strenuous attempts to resolve the dispute through legal channels, they focused on, often violent, forms of ‘disruptive power’ (Wilderman 2015). There were symbolic victories in their struggle, but these alone were far from decisive in their struggle.