LABOR MIGRATION and EMPLOYMENT in POST-APARTHEID RURAL SOUTH AFRICA by CASEY LANIER BLALOCK B.A., Rhodes College, 2003 M.A., University of Memphis, 2006

LABOR MIGRATION AND EMPLOYMENT IN POST-APARTHEID RURAL SOUTH AFRICA by CASEY LANIER BLALOCK B.A., Rhodes College, 2003 M.A., University of Memphis, 2006 A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Colorado in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Sociology 2014 This thesis titled Labor Migration and Employment in Post-Apartheid Rural South Africa and written by Casey Lanier Blalock has been approved for the Department of Sociology Jane Menken Co-chair of Committee Jason Boardman Co-chair of Committee May 8, 2014 The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories, and we find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline. Casey Lanier Blalock (Ph.D. Sociology) Labor Migration and Employment in Post-Apartheid Rural South Africa Thesis directed by Distinguished Professor Jane Menken and Associate Professor Jason Boardman South Africa formally began its transition into a neoliberal, democratic country in 1994 with its first elections. Although Black Africans gained equal access to public services and the freedom to relocate to formerly restricted areas, massive unemployment throughout South Africa during the post-apartheid era has prevented the majority of Black Africans from overcoming apartheid-era poverty. This dissertation aims to document the economic activity of a population in the former homeland of Gazankulu. Understanding the economic activities in former homelands is tricky. The labor migrant system under apartheid has continued into the post-apartheid era. Through labor migration, the economic activities of these populations occur outside the former homelands. The definitive source of employment and labor force data in South Africa is the Quarterly Labour Force Survey, formerly the Labour Force Survey. This survey uses a de facto population in which individuals are enumerated only if they have been recently present in the sampled households. This distorts our understanding of rural unemployment because it captures the economic activities only of those who do not engage in labor migration. This study uses data collected by the Agincourt Health and Demographic Surveillance Study (AHDSS) to evaluate the employment activities of the population within the AHDSS study site. As these data include a broadly defined, de jure household, this dissertation speaks to the employment of both labor migrants and non-migrants. The iii analyses presented in this dissertation reveal the limitations of survey data that use de facto populations in contexts where labor migration is high. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I’d like to thank all of the people who have offered their love, support, and guidance throughout my graduate career. Foremost, I’d like to thank my family for being so awesome. All of my life’s accomplishments, including this dissertation, wouldn’t have been possible without my family. They have nurtured my curiosity, accepted my limitations, and freely given their unconditional praise. For that, I thank them. I also want to thank my Colorado “family.” I met wonderful people and lifelong friends while in graduate school. For fear of overlooking someone in my haste to submit the dissertation, I will forgo listing them individually. We have shared many wonderful memories, and I am looking forwarding to creating more! I would like to thank Jason Boardman and Jane Menken, who served as co-chairs on my committee. Jason hired me as a research assistant (RA) during my first year at CU. He was my first exposure to demographic research. In addition to including me in his own research, Jason was a central component to my graduate school experience. He is always available to offer mentorship and guidance, and I learned much from Jason informally through our frequent meetings in his office. I thank him generally for his dedication to the students of sociology and specifically for the time he spent helping me grow as a demographer and as a person. Jane Menken served as the other committee co-chair, and like Jason, I have worked with Jane on many of her own projects. Jane opened doors that I didn’t know existed, and she played a central role in shaping my interest in international research. She provided opportunities for me and others to travel to South Africa and join in existing v collaborations with the scholars at the University of Witwatersrand and the Agincourt Health and Demographic Surveillance System. My dissertation would not have been possible without Jane’s guidance and pragmatism, and I thank her for all of her contributions. I am also grateful to my other committee members. Jill Williams reviewed countless drafts of my work and provided a sounding board for various ideas on a nearly monthly basis during the last few years. Randall Kuhn helped me fashion a dissertation by pushing me to consider new ideas and take different perspectives. Fernando Riosmena gave invaluable feedback on the broader labor migration literature and the overall framing of the thesis. I want to thank all of my committee for their patience and instruction throughout the dissertation-writing process. I would like to thank all the students, staff, and faculty members at the Institute of Behavioral Science (IBS) and the University of Colorado Population Center. These institutes offered tangible support in completing my degree, such as office space, printing and technology services, and travel funding to various conferences. Moreover, the people working at IBS are a great group of individuals. They provided a fertile environment for learning and collaboration, and all of the research tips, statistical tidbits, and programming tricks that I learned from the folks at IBS have certainly helped me complete the dissertation and have made me a better scholar and researcher. I’d like to thank my colleagues at the Agincourt Health and Demographic Surveillance System who provided data and insight into the running of a demographic surveillance study. vi As an RA, I benefited from the financial support of several institutions. I have worked under training fellowship funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and under research grants sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the Office of Population Affairs, Department of Health and Human Services. vii CONTENTS CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................... 1 Contributions....................................................................................................................... 3 Chapter Outlines ................................................................................................................. 4 CHAPTER 2. LITERATURE REVIEW ............................................................................ 8 Historical Context of Apartheid .......................................................................................... 8 Economic Change and Unemployment in South Africa ................................................... 12 Circular Labor Migration and African Households .......................................................... 15 CHAPTER 3. METHODS AND DATA .......................................................................... 21 Agincourt Study Site ......................................................................................................... 22 Migration Measures .......................................................................................................... 24 Labour Force Status Module ............................................................................................. 26 Data Limitations................................................................................................................ 32 CHAPTER 4. AGINCOURT AT WORK: THE PROFESSIONS AND ECONOMIC SECTORS OF WORKERS IN 2008 .................................................................... 37 Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 37 Chapter Methods ............................................................................................................... 39 Geography of the Employed Agincourt Labor Force ....................................................... 41 Employment in Agincourt................................................................................................. 49 Discussion ......................................................................................................................... 56 viii CHAPTER 5. RESIDENCY AND DIFFERENCES IN THE LABOR MARKET RATES OF AGINCOURT ................................................................................................. 58 The Nature of Residency Requirements ........................................................................... 58 Chapter Methods ............................................................................................................... 61 AHDSS Labor Migration Rates ........................................................................................ 62 AHDSS Labor Force Rates ............................................................................................... 64 Discussion ......................................................................................................................... 74 CHAPTER 6. LABOR MIGRATION IN A VOLATILE

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