Retail Worker Politics, Race and Consumption in South Africa: Shelved in the Service Economy by Bridget Kenny (review)

Why have retail worker labour politics endured, how have they changed, and to what effect? Bridget Kenny examines these important questions in the context of retail work in greater Johannesburg, pre-and post-apartheid, from the 1930s to 2013. Kenny's impressive historical ethnography is the result of 20 years of fieldwork research that included focus groups and interviews with retail workers, industry experts, retail managers, and retail union officials and shop stewards. Weaving together rich accounts of retail worker experiences, Kenny analyzes the labour relationship of retailing as a site of political terrain that constitutes the political subject of "workers" – abase-benzi. The book details how retail worker politics have been shaped by three connected dynamics: retail as a space that constructs the nation and belonging; labour law and its part in creating the subject of the "employee" and constructing the boundaries within which workers resist; and the ways in which abasebenzi goes beyond being solely a worker identity and reflects a complex articulation of race, class, and gender relations.

The story begins by examining women's retail labour in Johannesburg from the 1930s to the 1970s. In Chapter 2, Kenny illuminates how white, working-class female shop assistants participated in complex retail relations that simultaneously challenged and re-constituted gender, race, and class relations. Working for pay at a time when white women were discouraged from doing so, the shop assistants serviced other white customers and contributed to the development of a city which symbolized modernity, belonging, and racial exclusivity through a developing consumer culture. Represented by the National Union of Distributive Workers (nudw), white women retail workers in the 1930s were organized, held leadership roles in the union, and won improvements to wages and working conditions. At the same time, however, employers exercised control over female shop assistants by regulating their dress and appearance, and fathers and husbands exercised control over their work schedules and even decisions about whether or not to continue working after having children. By the 1960s, chain retailers were expanding and with larger stores came a re-organizing of the labour process. Corporate (male) hierarchies and management grew, and female shop assistants and cashiers had their work de-skilled, job tasks intensified, and autonomy threatened. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the growing retail industry faced white labour shortages, as white women moved into finance and public sector work, and consequently retailers began hiring Black workers into service jobs.

Chapter 3 examines the increasing entrance of Indian and Coloured women, and African men and women into retail work from the late 1960s to 1980s. The chapter details workers' experiences of discrimination in wages and hours of work, differential dress code requirements and job duties, as well as sexual harassment, that reinforced visible racial hierarchies and operated as ways for retail managers to maintain control while reproducing race and gender relations within workplaces. In this chapter readers learn how workers' access to means to challenge their discriminatory treatment mirrored the racist hierarchies that shaped retail workplaces. Under apartheid and labour law, the union that represented white retail workers (nudw) had to create a parallel union to organize Indian and Coloured workers (the National Union of Commercial and Allied Workers or nucaw). African workers would not have a union to join until 1975 and it was not until the early 1980s that the union was recognized. African workers, therefore, were especially subjected to workplace discrimination from managers, supervisors, and customers. Such conditions, Kenny explains, helped mobilize African workers to later join the Commercial Catering and Allied Workers Union of South Africa (ccawusa). The ccawusa provided a sense of belonging and helped form a collective political race-class subject (abasebenzi), while also creating a formal way to challenge marginalization and discriminatory working conditions.

One of the most interesting chapters, and a key contribution of the book, is Chapter 4. Chapter 4 provides a historical, socio-legal analysis of how South...