Abstract
Reclaimers engage in precarious labour that involves rescuing materials that have been thrown away and revaluing them because they see value in things others discard as valueless. As well as the mental and physical challenges confronted by men and women who do this work, women street reclaimers are especially vulnerable. They often struggle to safely and freely navigate urban streets due to high levels of gender violence and onerous working hours that start before dawn. Despite the peculiar challenges facing women, research on gender and how reclaimers organise is limited. This study contributes to this knowledge by exploring the organising experiences of informal women street reclaimers. The main aim of this study was to understand whether and how women street reclaimers from the African Reclaimers Organisation (ARO) organise to address their needs, interests and work challenges. Ethnographic methods; participatory observations and semi-structured interviews were used to collect data with five women street reclaimers in Johannesburg who are members of ARO and three ARO leaders, this study explored how the women work collectively and the opportunities to deepen collaboration.
The findings revealed that, a key strategy used by women to address the gender issues they confront is to enrol support from male colleagues and partners. While this strategy addresses their immediate practical gender needs, it serves to reinforce patriarchal assumptions of gendered power relations. In addition, women reclaimers also draw on traditionally feminised forms of solidarity which are not typically understood as part of worker organising strategies and collective action, such as stokvels and collective purchasing, to mediate their work-related challenges. To date, ARO’s organising has focused on class-based issues that affect all reclaimers, such as preventing dispossession through separation at source, improving access to materials, resolving conflicts between reclaimers and ensuring that reclaimers retrieve materials that the police confiscate. Although this approach to organising is strategically important to the women, it can also be strengthened by adopting an intersectional approach that directly addresses the ways in which class-based issues are also gendered and adopting a more explicitly feminist organising approach that directly communicates women’s needs such as a committee. This is in line to what Moser (1989) argues that in order for the needs and interests of low-income women in the Third World to be identified, they must be based on their priority concerns. The committee would not only be focused on highlighting and addressing gendered aspects of the challenges women face but would also include these aspects in finding methods the women could use to protect themselves from sexual harassment and gender-based violence during work. Additionally, their organisation could also look at institutionalising community-based methods
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such as stokvels not only for women, but reclaimers in general as these methods could help every reclaimer earn more income and achieve their yearly goals.