Leo Zeilig and Claire Ceruti point out that recent research on Soweto in South Africa shows that "in 78.3 percent of households there was a mix of adults who were employed, self-employed and unemployed". They conclude that:
the South African township and slum might be viewed as a meeting point for trade unionists, university students, graduates, the unemployed and informal traders. Though the spectre of unemployment affects all layers of society, these groups are not permanently cut off from each other and can be found in the same household supporting each other. 51
The picture is similar for El Alto, the satellite city of the Bolivian capital, La Paz. It contains hundreds of thousands of mainly indigenous Ayama people who have moved to the city from the countryside or closed down tin mines, and whose efforts to somehow make a living for themselves are characteristic of the informal sector in such cities everywhere in the Third World. Yet El Alto is also "the principal industrial zone of the La Paz region" ,52 with 54 percent of the region's industrial workforce and an increase of 80 percent in the numbers employed in industry in the last ten years. What is significant is "the combination between 'informality' and/or small businesses based on family labour on the one hand and the degree of incorporation of the labour force in wage labour in productive tasks on the other", so that neighbourhood forms of organisation have a class (as well as an indigenous) content.53
Under these circumstances, struggles by workers have the capacity to act as a focus for all discontents of the great majority of those living in the slums. So in South Africa a series of protests and riots over the delivery of basic services created an atmosphere in which:
the public sector general strike in June 2007 was the largest strike since the end of apartheid, pulling many people into trade union action for the first time. The potential cross-fertilisation of these struggles-of community and workplace-does not live only in the mind of activists, but, as the survey suggests, expresses the real household economy of contemporary South Africa. 54
Who Can Overcome?
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