The starting contention of this paper is that urban youth in South Africa’s informal settlements express dissatisfaction towards, and often refuse to take up, precarious and low-paying work, despite living in a time that is marked by exceedingly high rates of unemployment. Drawing upon twelve months of ethnographic research in Zandspruit informal settlement, I argue, contrary to Ferguson (2013, 2015), that unemployed youth are making declarations of independence – not dependence – when it is especially unfavourable to work for a wage, particularly at the bottom end of the labour market.
To illustrate the coherence of young men’s disdain for low-wage work, this paper begins by outlining the different modes of dependence (or types of labour) young men have available to them, choose, or fall into. In particular, I draw attention to two alternative modes of provisioning young men actively seek out: ‘hustling’ in the street economy, and ‘volunteering’ within local NGOs that offer access to state resources. These strategies and modes of life are not, as is often presumed, a last resort or a desperate remedy in the absence of work. Rather they are an attempt by these young men to guard themselves against succumbing to available but intolerable jobs.
This lays the groundwork for the second part of the paper, in which I develop an evaluative schema that highlights the social, moral, and political stakes involved in young men’s economic choices. This schema compels us to grapple with the entanglement of race, gender, citizenship and work. By tracing the appeal of the ‘wageless life’ (Denning, 2010) – along with the widespread aspiration to be one’s own boss - I argue that the rejection of low-wage work is not simply a response to its intolerability but, at least in some cases, a positive aspiration for self-determination and social mobility.