Making jobseekers amidst joblessness: The proper work of work-seeking in inner-city Johannesburg

Drawing on ethnographic research on formalized employment services in Johannesburg, South Africa, this paper examines the making of formal labour market participants where employment is structurally inaccessible. Here, the labour agency ceases to function as an institutional pathway into employment, rather becoming a sustained ‘workplace’ where the racialized urban poor indefinitely perform the work of work-seeking. Long-term work seekers, however, do not expect their search to yield concrete employment. Instead, they understand work-seeking as a form of meaningful, ‘proper’ and valued formalized work in its own right and approach their institutionally bound job hunt as a present-oriented activity that offers social belonging, interpersonal recognition and gendered affirmation. In doing so, they also rearticulate dominant understandings of what constitutes ‘proper’, ‘formal’ and ‘masculine’ work.