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- W2188999860 abstract "This article examines the ‘mall committee’, a new organizational form introduced by the South African Commercial Catering and Allied Workers Union to facilitate accessing and representing precarious, women workers in the retail sector. The mall committees were intended to function as a space to bring together workers employed in a mall to discuss issues that extended beyond the workplace. In practice, where mall committees, or informal networks operating under this name, have operated, they have been carried by gender structures within the union. The article is based on preliminary interviews with workers and shop stewards in Ekurhuleni, near Johannesburg. It interrogates the politics of this new strategy in terms of organizational form, geographical scale, and worker subjectivity and agency. It finds an enduring movement by worker activists to confront conditions within their broader context, but it argues the way in which these networks emerged in practice can also indicate the reproduction of hierarchies which marginalize precarious workers. It argues against a prescriptive argument for finding solutions to organizing in models of form or scale. Introduction This article discusses a new organizational form among South African retail workers, the ‘mall committee’. The South African Commercial Catering and Allied Workers Union (SACCAWU) mall committees emerged out of concern and discussion within the union over how to improve representation of casualized, often marginalized, women workers in the sector. The mall committees, implemented in practice through the gender structures of the union, are designed to bring workers employed by different stores in the same mall together to discuss common problems and to provide a space where workers can raise issues that extend beyond workplace demands (see Kenny, 2009). The article is based on preliminary research into mall committees conducted in two malls in Ekurhuleni Metropolitan 46 Municipality, one in a regional urban mall and the other in a local township mall, east of Johannesburg. The article poses questions about the extent to which this scalar organizational form enables precarious workers to connect broader concerns, frequently relating to household security or to citizenship, with workplace issues, and it interrogates theoretically how we might understand the political implications of this incipient organizational form in these contexts. There has been a recent and growing interest in consumption and mall development in South Africa (Beavon, 2004; Tomlinson and Larsen, 2003; Posel, 2009). The story of mall development in South African urban centres is similar to the expansion of shopping malls witnessed globally. Decentralization of shopping occurred in the 1960s as retailers expanded from the central business districts of towns to ‘white’ suburban residential areas. This process of decentralization continued in the 1990s as retailers increasingly relocated to new malls built in the wealthier northern suburbs of Johannesburg, and along the axis of the highway of the East Rand region into Ekurhuleni (Beavon, 2004). In this period, retailers “sought out the white consumer” (Tomlinson and Larsen, 2003: 44). More recently, and to great fanfare, mall development has spread into formerly black townships (Beavon, 2004; Posel, 2009) in recognition of the expanding ‘black middle class’ although since the 1980s marketers have recognized that retailers would have to begin to tap the so-called ‘black’ township market in order to grow (e.g., Bureau of Market Research, 1988). For some observers of South Africa’s magnificent malls, the fluidity of consumption enables new repertoires of identity and carries the potential to undercut past rigid racialized or class divisions (Nuttall, 2008; de Vries, 2008; Nkuna, 2006). For others, deepening inequality is implied in these postmodern forms and marked in spatial distinction (Murray, 2004; see Harvey, 1989; Merrifield and Swyngedouw, 1997). According to this view, the mall is one symptom along with other “dreamworlds of neoliberalism” (Davis and Monk, 2007; see also Hall and Bombardella, 2005) in which “sanitized security zones” (Murray, 2004: 155) protect prosperous urban residents while excising the poor (e.g., Murray, 2004; Smith, 1997; Caldeira, 1999; Lipman and Harris, 1999; Marks and Bezzoli, 2001). In South Africa, malls have been proven to be cultural productions, embedding aesthetic, symbolic and economic relations," @default.
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- W2188999860 date "2011-01-01" @default.
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- W2188999860 title "Reconstruire le modèle politique? Les comités de centre commercial et les travailleurs précaires d'Afrique du sud" @default.
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