Abstract
Based on in-depth interviews largely with women working as Community Health Workers
(CHWs), documents and internet sources, 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 research on which the article is based reveals that
CHW workers are crafting their own nascent organisational responses as women and as
precarious workers to their conditions. The post-apartheid state has implemented a neoliberal
programme which, in part, has led to an increase use of CHWs as a cheap labour system in the
provisioning of public health. This article, in several aspects, covers an area that has not been
discussed by the literature on labour studies in the South African context, namely the responses
of CHWs who have organised themselves to low wages and poor working conditions in the
public health system. Besides contributing to the literature, the research demonstrates that in
the context of precariousness, 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 like strikes, the law and collaborations with other formations like NGOs.