The Limits of Social Citizenship: Unemployment Insurance and the Reproduction of the South African Racial Capitalist State, 1937-2023

Abstract

Three decades following the end of apartheid, racial stratification continues to be reproduced along historically constituted lines. In this dissertation, I ask how the institutionalisation of unemployment insurance during the periods of segregation (1910-1947) and apartheid (1948-1994) continues to affect the racialization of social citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa. In other words, I ask how unemployment insurance legislation continues to undermine the democratization of social citizenship in the post-apartheid present. I use a historical sociological approach, engaging process-tracing while also drawing from historiographical literature and sociological theory. I draw extensively from legislative acts, parliamentary debates (Hansards), reports from various commissions of inquiry, and other relevant government and non-government materials. I draw heavily from secondary literature in order to contextualise the legislative changes made in the periods in question. Finally, I draw from a small number of interviews held with key informants on post-1994 social policy reform. I zoom in on five key episodes of policy building: the adoption of the Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) in 1937; the 1946 amendments made under the Jan Smuts government; the 1949 amendments made by the newly elected National Party government headed by D.F. Malan; the amendments made following the declared ‘independence’ of the Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda, and the Ciskei in the late 1970s and early 1980s; and, finally, the episode of policy reform following the democratic transition. The Union of South Africa, still under the British imperial arm, constructed an unemployment insurance system structured around the needs of the ‘ideal’ White worker to consolidate the South African racial capitalist state in the hands of the White minority. Drawing from Tiffany Willoughby-Herard’s path-defining Waste of a White Skin: The Carnegie Commission and the Racial Logic of White Vulnerability, I demonstrate how the ‘deserving’ White was defined against the anti-black logic of the ‘poor White’. In defining what whiteness was not, the White supremacist state was simultaneously defining what whiteness was. The ideal worker came to represent the urban, formalised, skilled, White male breadwinner. The ideal worker then, was not only implicitly racialized, but also gendered and classed. Situating the institutionalisation of the UIF in its broader historical and political-economic context, reveals how the state’s interest in upholding White supremacy was sometimes at odds with the demands of capital. Over time, as the state responded to these contradictions, the explicitly racialized exclusions were removed from the legislation. As a result, the UIF came to be mistaken as having been de-racialized in the final years of apartheid. The incremental naturalisation of racialization in the UIF’s eligibility criteria, combined with the rise of neoliberalism and the increasing presence of American imperial capital interests, meant that the UIF in the democratic era maintained its core structure first articulated by the White supremacist government. This is not to suggest that individuals historically racialized as Black cannot enjoy the ‘full rights’ of citizenship, but rather, it is to argue that the arbitrary markers that determine the boundary between inclusion and exclusion continue to obey the logic of normative (patriarchal) whiteness. In other words, individuals who approximate ‘middle-class whiteness’ are the most likely to enjoy the full benefits of social citizenship. As a result, historically marginalized communities continue to face exclusion (and precarious inclusion) from the social rights associated with South African citizenship.