Migrant labour in the digital age exploited

Brazil and India are starting to win gains for 'platform' workers such as delivery riders. Unions in South African must support similar struggles

- Richard Pithouse

The wealth of white South Africa was first built on the expropriation of land, and then the exploitation of black labour, much of it migrant labour.

The lives of men from places like Sul do Save in Mozambique and eMampondweni in the Eastern Cape were consumed by the mines. Women left their families to work in white people's homes. Black exploitation organised through containment and surveillance and legitimated by racism - produced systemic impoverishment.

While remnants of the old system of migrant labour remain, such as the decaying hostels in some of our cities, the passbooks have gone, as have the trains the metal snakes that carried the men to the mines. Hugh Masekela's Stimela is a song about the past. But new forms of migrant labour still generate corporate wealth, and enable the ease of middle-class life.

In the suburbs and gated communities, the most visible form of migrant labour is the growing number of men making deliveries on motorcycles. A rider from Malawi explains that he cannot begin to enjoy even the most basic pleasures of life until he has saved R30 000. This is the cost of repatriating his body if he is killed on the job. A rider working without making provision for the possibility of death risks binding his family to debt. It has been said that riding a delivery motorcycle is the most dangerous job in South Africa.

The labour movement has always carried limits to its understanding of what counts as work, who counts as a worker and what counts as a workplace. These limits have often been shaped by broader lines of exclusion, such as race, caste, nationality and gender. Domestic work has seldom been taken as seriously as other forms of work. Sex work has seldom been understood as work. When contemporary trade unions draw on narrow understandings of 19th-century ideas and 20th-century experiences, they are unable to take adequate measure of changing forms of work.

Planetary pain