Revaluing work beyond markets? Public work programmes between promise and practice

Leonie Hoffmann is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Drawing primarily on ethnographic and historical methods, her research examines work, redistribution, and outsourced governance in South Africa. Her current project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, seeks to account for the importance and changing shape of public work programmes in the post-apartheid period. It builds on prior research on the Community Work Programme and policy debates on the expansion of social grants. She holds a DPhil (PhD) in International Development from Oxford and has a background in political theory.

This seminar examines public work programmes (PWP) as interventions into the value of work amid mass joblessness. Focusing on the case of the Community Work Programme (CWP), the paper ethnographically investigates how value is produced, claimed, and contested within policy and practice. By mobilising “surplus” labour and directing it towards the common good, CWP promised to revalue it beyond markets while expanding income support to those hitherto beyond the reach of public assistance. However, this paper shows how such promises became unsettled. Increasingly perceived by policymakers and the wider public as a “social grant in disguise”, CWP participants (and activists) consider their labour to be profoundly devalued. To understand these contrasting claims of value – and their political implications – the paper argues it is necessary to reconsider the value of work not as determined solely on markets or accorded by government intervention, but as arising from ongoing practices of commensuration between monetary and non-monetary forms of worth.

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