Communication as a Practice of Collective Organising among Precarious Workers in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Sammanfattning

This study examines communication as an everyday social and political practice: how do precarious workers in post-apartheid South Africa organise collectively, and how does voice emerge in this process? The thesis analyses how historical and racialised labour inequalities shape contemporary practicesof voice, dignity and collective struggle, and which everyday communication practices are involved in building collective identity and solidarity. The empirical basis is a qualitative case study drawing on semi-structured interviews with organisers and workers from the Casual Workers Advice Office (CWAO) and the Simunye Workers Forum in Johannesburg, participant observation of a general meeting, as well as organisational documents and communication materials. The theoretical framework combines Communication for Development, voice theory and critical precarity research. The analysis develops three central findings. First, precarity in post-apartheid South Africa is not only an economic but also a communicative condition: fear of dismissal, systematic humiliation and institutional non-recognition suppress workers' ability to speak before collective organising can even begin. The study captures this constellation through the concept of communicative precarity: a historically produced and politically reproduced order that determines who is permitted to speak and whose experiences circulate. Second, communication practices – general meetings, WhatsApp groups,pamphlets, digital solidarity appeals – emerge as an active response to these conditions and produce voice, collective identity and political agency under circumstances that structurally work against them. Third, these practices remain fragile: collective identity is their ongoing communicative achievement, not their precondition. The study therefore shifts the focus of Communicationfor Development research from communication interventions to the everyday communicative work of grassroots organising, showing that voice under conditions of communicative precarity must be continuously produced through collective practice.