The case of a toxic workplace

In my industrial sociology class with Professor Eddie Webster in the mid-1990s, I was introduced to how the South African apartheid workplace was racialised with the intention of creating profit for the white capitalist system. 

Webster writes extensively about how the racialised workplace manifests through disciplinary control of workers. 

In the work of Jacklyn Cock and later Malehoko Tshoaedi, we also see how the disciplinary control is gendered, with black women experiencing the toxicity in often hidden and intimate ways. 

Most recently, Sisa Ngabaza cautioned about the call centre industry, where we see a growing feminisation of labour that “capitalises on women as a cheap, submissive workforce”.

Thus, what the violent death of Gcina Dhladhla, who died on duty at her Rosebank workplace recently, reveals is neither new nor a stand-alone experience. 

It is a systemic issue woven into the fabric of South African institutions in ways that we erroneously accept as normative. 

As we normalise systemic violence in our institutions, we define individuals who cannot survive them, like Dhladhla and other unnamed people, as fragile, weak or not strong enough. 

In the same breath, we define those who survive them as successful. Survival comes at a cost to one’s humanity. 

Critical theory calls it endurance: a vulnerability that is not acknowledged. A constant navigation of systemic conditions meant to cause death. It is adaptation to a system that is meant to create dying rather than living. 

How many young women have left the call centre factory on a stretcher, having either died or collapsed from exhaustion?

The systematic violence illustrated in the Dhladhla case is  violence that we see not only in erroneous workplace notions of what it means to be a good worker but also in how the state puts pressure on a drowning citizenry. 

Most recently, there has been an emphasis on how the Maintenance Act makes provision for family members to support other family members. 

The advocacy for family support is emphasised in a context where those who work already support their families, while the failures of the state force them to spend on private health, education and security. 

This type of government, like the apartheid workplace regime, is not allowing its citizenry to make a living but rather a dying. 

We see the violence in how success in the education sector is framed in individualised ways. 

The framing leads to growing graduate unemployment, high burnout levels among lecturers and administrators and a lack of care in how managers respond to those unable to survive overwork.

What does it mean for black women to work and thrive? Is this even possible for us? 

The growing use of AI in the call centre environment deepens disciplinary controls and enhances surveillance through call and keystroke monitoring. 

The surveillance disciplines the worker and leads to psychological and physical strain. 

The constant surveillance makes it nearly impossible to resist using the tactics of the past, such as “deliberately slowing down production”. 

Coupled with the growing prevalence of intimidation and bullying meant to discourage union membership, another important worker-resistance tactic — shopfloor mobilisation — is weakened. 

Although the Labour Relations Act protects employees’ freedom of association, bullying in the workplace is real and contributes to dehumanising practices.

Even though other popular resistance methods are emerging, Dhladhla’s death  shows us that immediate preventative resistance is needed. 

Resistance cannot happen after the fact. What we need are systems that honour life, rest, healing and being human. No child should die because they need a job.

What Dhladhla’s violent death reveals is that the apartheid workplace regime is not a thing of the past; it is very much alive and lethal.

Grace Khunou is a professor of sociology and the executive director for leadership and transformation at Unisa.