The new struggles of precarious workers in South Africa: nascent organisational responses of community health workers

Abstract

ABSTRACT Based on in-depth interviews largely with women working as community health workers (CHWs) and documents, the article shines the spotlight on CHWs, who remain a blind spot in the literature on South African labour studies. Abandoned by mainstream unions and often ignored by labour scholars, the article reveals that CHW workers are crafting their own nascent organisational responses as women and as precarious workers to their conditions. New organisational responses led by women who carry most of the social and economic burden are beginning to contest their conditions of precariousness by using tools such as strikes.