This book argues that we need to focus attention on the ways that workers themselves have
invested subjectively in what it means to be a worker. By doing so we gain an explanation that
moves us beyond the economic decisions made by actors the institutional constraints faced by
trade unions or the power of the state to interpellate subjects. These more common
explanations make workers and their politics visible only as a symptom of external conditions
a response to deregulated markets or a product of state recognition. Instead - through a
history of retailing as a site of nation and belonging changing legal regimes and
articulations of race class and gender in the constitution of political subjects from the
1930s to present-day Wal-Mart - this book presents the experiences and subjectivities of
workers themselves to show that the collective political subject 'workers' ( abasebenzi ) is
both a durable and malleable political category. From white to black women's labour the forms
of precariousness have changed within retailing in South Africa. Workers' struggles in
different times have in turn resolved some dilemmas and by other turn generated new categories
and conditions of precariousness all the while explaining enduring attachments to labour
politics.
