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This volume brings together established scholars and early-career researchers to foreground African contributions to labour studies. Spanning historical and contemporary developments, it examines youth employment, gendered labour, migration, informality, labour politics and emerging forms of work across the continent.
Through rich case studies and comparative analysis, contributors interrogate how concepts such as class, labour market segmentation, power resources and worker agency have been deployed and contested in African contexts. In doing so, the book demonstrates how African empirical realities invite a rethinking of labour studies and its theoretical foundations.
Mohammad Amir Anwar is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in African Studies and International Development at the University of Edinburgh and a Senior Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg. He is co-author of The Digital Continent: Placing African in the Planetary Networks of Work (Oxford University Press, 2022).
Hannah J. Dawson is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Anthropology and Development Studies Department at the University of Johannesburg. She is author of Making a Life: Young Men on Johannesburg’s Urban Margins (Wits University Press, 2025)
Nelson Oppong is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) at the Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, and a Senior Research Associate in Sociology at Rhodes University. His work brings together interdisciplinary research and extensive policy engagement on international development, governance, human rights, extractive industries, environmental change, and political economy across Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific.
1. African Labour Studies: The Intersecting Theories, Histories, and Struggles – Mohammad Amir Anwar, Hannah Dawson, Nelson Oppong
Part I: Histories
2. Overalls and Gowns in the Making of South Africa’s Labour Studies: Between Theory and Praxis – Vannessa Kruger, Ari Sitas and Bianca Tame
3. The Return of the Labour Process: Race, Skill and Technology in South African Labour Studies – Bridget Kenny and Edward Webster
Part II: Labour Market Dynamics
4. Labour Market Challenges in North Africa: Root Causes and Recent Developments – Ragui Assaad and AlAnoud Ehab
5. Reproducing Poverty, Inequality, and Unemployment: The Central Role of South Africa’s Labour Market – David Francis and Siphelele Ngidi
6. Large-Scale Transport Infrastructure and Labour Markets in Urban Africa – Lena Fält and Ilda Lindell
7. The Social Ills of Extractivism: Labour Rights and the Tangled Web of Supply Chains in Ghana – Nelson Oppong
8. At the Bottom of the Global Exploitation Chains: Export Horticulture and Wage Wabour in Tanzania – Fabio De Blasis
Part III: Precarity and Conditions of Precarious Work
9. Domestic Work in South Africa: A Generational Curse or a Steppingstone? – Quraisha Dawood
10. Labour Market Precariousness and Young People’s (Un)willingness To Participate in the Platform Economy Hustle – Simbarashe Gukurume
11. Precarity Across Borders? Zimbabwean Migrant Labour and the Shifting Dynamics of South Africa’s Labour Market – Kudakwashe Vanyoro and Thabani Mutambasere
Part IV: Class Identity and Differentiation
12. A Class Analysis of Informal Own-Account Workers in Africa: A Case Study of Petty Trading in Sierra Leone – Joshua Lew McDermott
13. “On Our Own”: Women Navigating the Margins of Zimbabwe’s Informal Sector, State and Lack of Regulation – Manase Kudzai Chiweshe and Patience Mutopo
14. Who Counts as a Worker: Class Politics in Africa’s Gig Economy – Ruth Castel-Branco
Part V: Worker Power and Agency
15. Unveiling Resistance: Congolese Unionists and the Struggle Against Colonial Power – Saint José Inaka
16. The Politics of Informal Labour: Power, Liminality and Agency – Ilda Lindell and Fernanda Almeida
17. Refusing Low Wage Jobs and the Contested Meanings of Work in Urban South Africa – Hannah J. Dawson
18. Worker Power, Algorithmic Management and African Resistance in the Digital Age – Mohammad Amir Anwar
19. The Political Economy of Universal Basic Income in Three Sub-Saharan African Countries – Kelle Howson and Siyanda Baduza