ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how black workers in the Johannesburg municipality struggled to build union power during the apartheid and post-apartheid periods. It develops an analytical framework based on different forms of worker power. The chapter shows how the goals and forms of power changed in the different cycles of resistance based on the analytical framework. It identifies three cycles of municipal workers struggles against privatisation and contract work, framed around the repertoires of inclusion and exclusion. The chapter demonstrates that trade unions are able to draw on new forms of power, logistical and symbolic power, which extend traditional forms of workers power. The struggles of municipal workers are furthermore best seen as Marx-Polanyi dialectic in which Marx's focus on struggles around exploitation in production are intensified by labour market flexibility through the process of commodifcation introduced by privatisation.
