Futures of work

If the future of work in Africa is to contain decent jobs and fair outcomes for African workers, we need to ensure that we appropriately conceptualize the transnational networks in which digital jobs are embedded. Employers and workers, through the affordances of digital technologies, are seeking each other out on genuinely planetary labour markets, escaping some of the constraints that previously bound them exclusively to their local labour markets. A planetary labour market of digital work that can go anywhere does not necessarily mean that it exists nowhere. Economic production is embedded in socio-political and cultural contexts. Thus, to create a better future for workers in Africa, state and its institutions, trades unions, and civil society organizations, must rise to the challenge of not just thinking globally, but also acting globally if we want a planetary labour market to represent anything other than a global race to the bottom.