Introduction: Setting the Scene on Universalising ‘Decent Work’
What is meant by ‘decent work’ in different social environments? At a global level, it may be understood in a regulatory, ‘functional’, and hierarchical sense that is faithful to normative vocabularies and structural arrangements that are enfolded by an abundance of institutions such as the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the United Nations (UN), and academia. Decent work, however, can also serve emancipatory objectives, as well as concrete efforts to address job creation, rights at work, inclusion, dignity, fair pay, equity, social protection, and social dialogue; this is important in many ways. However, there exists a risk of hegemonic versions that may prevent particularist expressions from different contexts and, as a consequence, become complicit in reproducing the very same order that particularist expressions seek to counter. This dialectic of the provincial versus the universal is a long-standing conversation in academia and in political discourse. Aimé Césaire illuminates this discussion by positing the following:
I am not burying myself in a narrow particularism. But neither do I want to lose myself in an emaciated universalism. There are two ways to lose oneself: walled segregation in the particular or dilution in the ‘universal’. My conception of the universal is that of a universal enriched by all that is particular, a universal enriched by every particular: the deepening and coexistence of all particulars.
This instructive excerpt from Cesaire aligns with Sen’s concept of ‘Nyaya’ (see Chapters 1 and 2) and demonstrates the possibility of a shared universal, but the key condition of possibility is the recognition of the particular/provincial. A universal meaning of decent work is therefore possible. The view of a universal meaning of decent work resonates with the transcendentality of Marx’s dictum: “Workers of the world, unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.” This focuses on the worker’s universal identity, which can play a significant role in proposing and establishing universal values for workers. It cannot be denied, however, that these well-meaning dictums, shaped by respective local histories, may develop a life of their own; for example, in the South African miners’ strike of 1922, the dictum took a racial turn into: ‘Workers of the World, Fight and Unite for a White South Africa!’. See the section on ‘South Africa and the Coloniality of Work’ for an elaboration of the South African example.
Michel Foucault entirely dismisses the idea of the universal by stating that no single, overarching theory can fully account for all contexts, only situated responses to specific questions are possible [Reference Sarup2]. How can we conceptualise well-being and decent work with universal application when the precarity of workers differs across the globe as caused by respective historical circumstances and legal and social institutions? This chapter argues that notions of well-being and decent work need to be contextualised through the recognition of localised concrete social realities before they can be universalised. This approach prevents solutions adopted from other social orders that often result in constructed social policies that deepen the structural social exclusions of others.
The proposed approach also enables the analysis to move away from idealist improvisations of concepts, especially in the face of changes in the world of work, where new information technologies and the proliferation of legalities have not restrained the challenges that exist. This position, we hope, can help us break down the persistent divisions between the global North/Global South, Centre/Periphery, Communist/Capitalist, and Developed/Non-developed and thus create a universal meaning of decent work in the process of transcending but not invisibilising particularities of national and group identities.
Rather than viewing the universalisation of well-being and decent work as a means to incorporate those who are structurally marginalised into the mainstream, this chapter aims to create a platform for shared cultural values on the basis of dialogue, equality, justice, inclusion, and societal solidarity. These values will enable us to interrogate the streams of the social division of work and to scrutinise the existing ideas and frameworks of the very meaning of work. At the centre of this chapter are three questions.
First, is the following question: How may border thinking help us think about decent work in different societal contexts? Border thinking is a decolonial concept that is based on the idea that “the theoretical and epistemic must have a lived dimension to them, and it constitutes the alternative experiences of those who have been excluded from knowledge production by modernity” [Reference Mignolo and Tlostanova3, p. 206]. This terrain has been overemphasised by many scholars: “no one has ever devised a method for detaching the scholar from the circumstances of life, from the fact of his involvement, conscious or unconscious, with a class, set of beliefs, a social position or from the mere activity of being a member of a society” [Reference Said4, p. 10].
Second, is it possible to be human in the workplace? Decent work and capital may seem to be contradictory couplings because, in modernity, workers appear to be tools that may be disposed of after certain hours or age (retirement) and use. An examination of the fundamental practicalities of the concept of decent work may reveal how it is connected to an underlying philosophy of humanity, human dignity, justice, equity, and flourishing. However, the complexity of the world system in modernity places other people below the human line, something that disrupts all efforts to transcend particularities in the pursuit of a universal concept of decent work. The Portuguese scholar Boaventura Santos introduced the concept of the abyssal line. The abyssal line denotes a line that separates metropolitan societies from colonial societies after the end of historical colonialism and that also divides the social reality within the respective societies [Reference Santos5]. Santos’s posture reveals how normative categories may be limiting due to variances in the socio-historical circumstances of people; however, we submit that the centrality of the human and basic social needs in all these challenges demands a universal explanation.
This leads to the third question: how, despite enduring intra-communal antagonisms, may social justice theories help construct a universal understanding of decent work that transcends national and epistemological lines?
Using two social justice frameworks that converge, diverge, and cross-fertilise, the decolonial epistemic lens, and the capability approach (CA), we critically examine how concepts emerging from local specificities can be embedded in broader universal critique. On the basis of these two theories, we provide a platform for understanding how not only local conceptions of decent work may be generated but also how they may be broadened to incorporate and inform experiences from other global contexts. Located in the South African experience and historical context and to reinforce our argument, the chapter is overarched by Michel Foucault’s concept of parrhesia.
Parrhesia, an early-century Greek concept, denotes “a verbal activity in which the speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth, and risks his life because he recognises truth-telling as a duty to improve or help other people as well as himself” [Reference Foucault6, p. 20]. It is “linked to a certain social situation, to a difference of status between the speaker and his audience, to the fact that the parrehsiastas says something which is dangerous to himself and thus involves a risk” [Reference Foucault6, p. 13]. It is about truth. “In Parrhesia, the speaker emphasises the fact that he is both the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the enunciandum” [Reference Foucault6, p. 17]. Decolonial theory and the CA as parrhesia are relevant in discoursing decent work, particularly in the colonies where the definition of labour was built on the back of dehumanisation, exploitation, and dispossession.
This complex character of labour foundations is explored through an attempt to amalgamate the decolonial epistemic lens and the CA as one way to move beyond Eurocentric frameworks that marginalize the role of the colonial experience in shaping the modern world. A proper and authentic understanding of this complex character plays an important role in constructing a transformative and universal understanding of decent work. Perhaps only then can we think of an organic solidarity that deviates from transfixed bourgeoise scholarship that is ignorant of non-Western epistemologies. Consequently, in the Foucauldian spirit, “the parrehsiastas primarily chooses a specific relationship to himself: he prefers himself as a truth-teller rather than a living being who is false to himself” [Reference Foucault6, p. 17], which tells the truth as duty and an element of risk as espoused in many cultures such as Steve Biko’s Frank Talk: “Bourgeoise humanism has been implicated in the false consolidation of scientific racism” [Reference Biko and Stubbs7, p. 29]; or, in another example, Jewish historians: “whichever approach they took, they risked incurring the wrath of peers, relatives and eventually the state for being unwilling to accept the prevalent view of Zionism” [Reference Pappé8, p. 9].
South Africa and the Coloniality of Work: Need for a Paradigm Shift
To understand what decent work means in the Global South, especially in the South African context, it is essential to reckon with the enduring legacy of colonialism and apartheid. These historical structures and power asymmetries continue to shape the labour environment. These systems do not merely impose economic inequalities; they institute an ontological division in humanity itself, a division that continues to shape labour relations. The concept of decent work cannot be approached as a neutral or universal category because it has long been entangled in colonial legacies and racial hierarchies.
This section argues that coloniality is not a residue of the past but rather an enduring structure that informs modernity and the meanings of labour, productivity, and human worth. It seeks to unveil how well-meaning universalist claims about decent work may unwittingly sustain the very systems of inequality they aim to challenge. Therefore, this section reveals how universal claims to decent work may mask and sometimes reproduce hierarchies of race, value, and voice. Decolonial thought and the CA, when read as parrhesia truth-telling in the face of risk, offer critical tools to confront this contradiction.
The Dual Nature of Modernity: Progress and Domination and Coloniality as the Evil Image of Modernity
Modernity is often understood as a period of scientific progress, reason, individual freedom, and enlightenment. These ideals, interwoven with the era and the ideas of the Enlightenment, have historically had both positive and negative consequences in the Western world in which they originated. On the one hand, they brought important progress. On the other hand, major problems arose because these ideas became intertwined and came to justify extreme forms of orthodox Calvinism and capitalism. In colonised societies, these effects are more severe and disastrous [Reference Mignolo and Tlostanova3, Reference Santos5]. These ideas served, through a claim of universal validity and thus the vindication of conversion, as vehicles of domination; modernity was for these colonised populations not only an external imposition but also an existential disruption. As Anthony Giddens noted, the Enlightenment project combined with capitalism and Protestantism produced a form of modernity that was not only productive but also hierarchical and exclusionary [Reference Tucker9]. In colonised contexts such as South Africa, modernity was not experienced as liberation but as a structure of violence, expropriation, and racialised discipline. Other decolonial thinkers, such as Walter Mignolo and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, recognise that coloniality is the obverse of modernity, its structuring logic of dehumanisation, racial classification, and dispossession [Reference Maldonado-Torres10, Reference Mignolo11]. In this context, concepts such as well-being, freedom, and even decent work are not innocent or neutral; they are historically entangled with projects of hierarchy and domination.
Coloniality did not end with formal decolonisation. It persists in contemporary structures of power, knowledge, and labour. Concepts such as decent work, when abstracted from these historical roots, risk becoming epistemically violent. What appears universal may in fact be (Western) provincial, a Western conception of labour exported globally through international institutions, development agendas, and academic frameworks. A key task, then, is to denaturalise these concepts and examine how they may conceal rather than correct global inequalities.
In South Africa, modernist ideals of labour were grafted onto colonial needs. As Wallerstein noted, the global division of labour organised countries into “core” and “periphery” – a division not merely economic but racialised. At the core: high wages, rights, and dignity. In the periphery: low wages, coercion, and expendability [Reference Wallerstein12]. This duality is not just economic; it reflects the coloniality of being, in which some are recognised as fully human and others as disposable.
The Colonial Construction of the Worker: Violence as Foundation
In South Africa, the coloniality of work is not a metaphor. It is a lived reality rooted in the dispossession of land, forced labour, and racial hierarchies that define the economic order. In line with this, the very category of the worker in the South African context cannot be disentangled from coercion. Africans were systematically dispossessed of land and livelihoods through legislation such as the Glen Grey Act [13], not to liberate labour but to compel it. The Act was designed to dispossess Black South Africans of land and compel them into wage labour, not as free agents but as coerced subjects. This foundational violence underpins what decolonial scholars term the coloniality of being, the dehumanisation and marginalisation of non-Europeans from the zone of full humanity.
Decent work, in this context, cannot be understood without recognising how work itself was historically constructed as a tool of domination. The idea of labour was intertwined with Christian morality and capitalist productivity, both of which required the redefinition of African subjectivity. As Atkins [Reference Atkins14] and Magubane [Reference Magubane15] have shown, Black South Africans were moulded, through violence, laws, and cultural repression, into an idealised worker modelled on European capitalist values. This was not a neutral process; it was one of social death [Reference Atkins14], of erasing cultural identities and replacing them with commodified labour roles.
Structural Continuities: Apartheid and Its Afterlife
Despite the formal end of apartheid, the legacies of these colonial constructions, such as the racialised distribution of labour, persist in South Africa’s post-apartheid labour market and continue to shape who gets what kind of work, under what conditions, and at what social cost. As Magubane observed, even after the official end of apartheid, Black South Africans continue to dominate the ranks of domestic work, mining, and other precarious sectors and servile roles [Reference Magubane15]. In this sense, apartheid’s labour logic has mutated but not vanished. The contemporary reality of black workers walking white children or pets while separated from their own families is not merely anecdotal; it is systemic. These are not isolated indignities but symptoms of an enduring “zone of non-being” [Reference Fanon16], where dignity and recognition remain deferred. Despite the formal dismantling of apartheid and claims of a rapture, forms of dehumanisation persist in contemporary South Africa’s labour landscape [Reference Boëttger and Rathbone17]. Conditions of segregation are no longer legally sanctioned in the country; however, the struggle for social rights and decent work remains burdened by pervasive structural inequalities [Reference Bazana18]. For example, Black South Africans remain disproportionately represented and concentrated in insecure, low-wage, and low-skilled jobs in sectors such as farming, domestic work, mining, and the gig economy [Reference Alexander, Lekgowa, Mmope, Sinwell and Xezwi19, Reference Bhorat and Khan20]. The transition from the legal segregation of apartheid to contemporary structural inequality remains strikingly evident even in inherited spatial apartheid, where many township residents still endure long, costly commutes into economic hubs owing to the racially motivated geography engineered under apartheid [Reference Mabin and Smit21, Reference Turok and Borel-Saladin22]. Coupled with this is the rise of casualised and informal labour, often through schemes such as the Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP), which offer only insecure temporary jobs and fail to alleviate social and economic precarity [Reference Mkhatshwa-Ngwenya23]. Examples include Nasi Ispani, a government initiative to provide access and job opportunities to unemployed youth. Racial pay disparities also persist, as documented by recent litigation and labour market data showing that white South Africans continue to dominate top-paying positions and enjoy significantly higher remuneration than their Black counterparts do, despite policy reforms such as Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) and employment equity and how white household annual income is five times greater than that of black families [Reference Boëttger and Rathbone17, Reference Diedericks and Bosch24]. The Marikana massacre of 2012 tragically also epitomised how labour remains racialised and dehumanised: the state’s lethal response to black mine workers striking for fair wages revealed disturbing continuities with apartheid-era patterns of labour control and repression [Reference Boëttger and Rathbone17].
This racialised order is not simply a matter of inequality in pay or conditions. It reflects deeper epistemic assumptions about who is considered fully human, who is seen as disposable, and who gets to define what constitutes dignity and fairness at work. The notion of the ‘illegal miner’, for example, strips human beings of their history, struggles, and context, reducing them to objects of criminality. Similarly, the horrifying case of workers being fed to lions, or the massacre of striking miners at Marikana in 2012, are not aberrations but symptoms of a deeper colonial logic where certain lives remain ungrievable and expendable.
Thingification and the Denial of Agency
The idea of a “gate of misery”, as described by Atkins [Reference Atkins14], captures this process: people were driven into labour through manufactured poverty and displacement. This echoes Aimé Césaire’s concept of “thingification” [Reference Césaire and Edwards1], the reduction of colonised people to mere instruments of labour, devoid of agency or dignity. In South Africa, this is not a rhetorical device but a historical reality. The apartheid regime, building upon colonial foundations, sought to define African people not by their humanity but by their labour utility [Reference Atkins14]. Education was designed not for empowerment but for functional compliance, as former South African prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd’s infamous remarks make clear: “What is the use of teaching a Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice? This is quite absurd. Education must train people in accordance with their opportunities in life, according to the sphere in which they live” [Reference Verwoerd25].
This process of reducing people to labour inputs in South Africa continues today in different forms through the commodification of workers and the normalisation of inequality. Multiple examples demonstrate how systemic inequality continues to shape the South African labour market, particularly for historically marginalised groups. In the mining sector, for example, workers often endure dangerous conditions, substandard living arrangements, and precarious employment, whereas executives and multinational companies reap enormous profits, revealing how inequality is embedded and normalised in extractive industries [Reference Alexander, Bonnema, Farmer and Reimold26, Reference Webster and Dor27]. Similarly, platform-based gig workers, such as those employed by Uber or Bolt, are classified as independent contractors and thereby excluded from labour protection, including Unemployment Insurance Fund contributions, medical aid, pension benefits, and paid sick leave, effectively commodifying them as tools rather than employees with rights [28, Reference Bhorat, Kanbur and Stanwix29]. Labour brokering further exacerbates dispensability, particularly in outsourced sectors such as university cleaning services, where workers receive minimal job security or social benefits [Reference Kenny and Bezuidenhout30]. Farm and domestic labour, employing over a million mostly black women from historically disadvantaged communities, continues to reflect the legacy of apartheid-era labour exploitation; many still earn below the minimum wage and face systemic barriers to workplace protection, reinforcing their treatment as interchangeable and disposable rather than as rights-bearing individuals [Reference Alfers, Lund and Moussie31, Reference Du Toit32]. Across these sectors, the persistence of commodification and disposability underscores how labour remains deeply racialised, gendered, and hierarchical in post-apartheid South Africa [Reference Satgar33].
To be compelled into labour without agency is to be denied the possibility of decency. It is here that the universal language of decent work loses its ethical coherence; it cannot be universal if it obscures the structurally coerced conditions of entry. This denial of agency is also evident in how unemployment functions as a tool of coercion. In conditions of extreme poverty and high joblessness, workers have no real choice. Their entry into the labour market is not voluntary but shaped by structural necessity, a choice between a black mamba and a cobra, as the saying goes. This undermines any simplistic claim that all employment is inherently good.
Framed through the decolonial epistemic lens, the critique examines the complex realities of Black South Africans in the world of work as shaped by historical systemic marginalisation. While acknowledging the colonial and apartheid legacies that continue to shape labour conditions, the critique does not seek to portray workers as passive subjects of history. Instead, the study underscores a dual reality, where on the one hand, primarily black, coloured, and migrant workers remain subject to exploitative, precarious, and insecure employment conditions. These include workers seen in the plight of EPWP participants, unprotected domestic workers, and ride-hailing drivers demanding fair treatment [Reference Webster and Dor27, Reference Satgar33] and others, where increasing numbers of Black South Africans hold power and challenge these inequities. Post-apartheid South Africa has adopted transformative policies aimed at redressing these systemic inequalities in the world of work, such as BEE and B-BBEE. However, the various policies’ impacts have been deeply contested and complex precisely for the failure to change the structural foundations of the economy since unemployment, poverty, and inequality remain overwhelmingly racialised and the majority of the historically disadvantaged remain excluded from the economy. While these policies are presented as redistributive, critics argue that they are merely a facade for power aggrandisement, simultaneously perpetuating the hegemony of large, white corporations rather than fundamentally changing ownership structures or breaking down structural inequality [Reference Tangri and Southall34, Reference Ponte, Roberts and Van Sittert35]. These same companies structure and fund BEE deals by fronting black elites, protecting the interests of racialised capital instead of genuine transformation. As such, the result is a mutation rather than a transformation with a dual economy characterised by a small black elite that has been parachuted to access wealth and influence, whereas the black and poor majority remains locked in precarious work, high unemployment, and spatial inequality, largely excluded from the promised benefits of empowerment [Reference Southall36]. Rather than disrupting economic injustice, B-BBEE has too often reproduced it under the guise of reform. Therefore, there is a need to understand how historical injustices mutate, not disappear, coupled with a deeper questioning of whose knowledge, values, and definitions of dignity and fairness dominate the world of work and how these can be reimagined from the margins [Reference Southall36, Reference Acemoglu, Gelb and Robinson37, Reference Chipkin, Swilling, Bhorat, Buthelezi, Duma and Friedenstein38]. Thus, there remains a call for those in power, especially those from historically disadvantaged backgrounds, to leverage their reclaimed agency to transform labour systems in ways that are more inclusive, dignified, and aligned with decolonial values. Representation alone is not liberation without systemic reform, and black leadership can be co-opted to maintain inequality.
Beyond Theoretical Redundancy: Two Core Frames
To avoid theoretical saturation and yet remain analytically sharp, we propose, following Aimé Cézaire, two interlocking frames [Reference Césaire and Edwards1]:
1. Coloniality of Work: This frame highlights how the very foundations of labour relations in the Global South are rooted in violence, exclusion, and racial hierarchies. Work, as it was constructed in colonial and apartheid South Africa, was not a site of human dignity but of social death [Reference Patterson39]. A universal claim to decent work that does not reckon with these origins risks reproducing what Grosfoguel calls “epistemicide”, the erasure of non-Western ways of understanding value, labour, and dignity [Reference Grosfoguel40].
2. Thingification of the Worker: Drawing on Césaire [Reference Césaire and Edwards1] and Spivak [Reference Spivak, Nelson and Grossberg41], this frame problematises the assumption that all workers possess agency. In conditions of mass unemployment or coerced labour, the choice to work is often between two forms of suffering. Can the subaltern truly be a worker when the conditions of choice are defined by structural violence?
Together, these frames illustrate how the universalising and historical discourse on decent work, however well intended, must confront its complicity in reproducing colonial logic. We do so next.
Towards an Epistemic Disobedience
To grasp the full implications of this historical continuity, we must interrogate the epistemologies that shape dominant labour discourses. What is needed, then, is not just a critique of working conditions but an epistemic disobedience, a refusal to accept dominant frameworks that obscure the coloniality of labour. Following Santos [Reference Santos5], we distinguish between knowledge as regulation and knowledge as emancipation. The former maintains the status quo, the fiction of neutrality and objectivity; the latter emerges from lived experience, centres historical consciousness, and justice and aims at transformation. Decolonial thought insists that decent work must be redefined not from the standpoint of regulatory institutions such as the ILO alone but from subaltern knowledge that reveals how work is experienced under conditions of structural violence.
This is not a call to abandon the concept of decent work but to reground it. We argue for a “pluriversal” conception that resists the hegemonic universalism of the Enlightenment and embraces a universal enriched by particularity [Reference Césaire and Edwards1]. This means acknowledging that what counts as ‘decent’ must be negotiated with communities shaped by coloniality, not imposed upon them.
Decoloniality and the CA, when combined, offer a way to think beyond both parochial particularism and abstract universalism. Sen’s focus on situated capabilities [Reference Sen42–Reference Sen and Brooks45], when placed in dialogue with decolonial thought, allows us to envision a pluriversal approach to decent work: one that recognises shared human aspirations while grounding them in historical and cultural specificity. This is not about rejecting universal values but about reimagining them from the margins.
Decent Work as Parrhesia: Towards Contextual Universalism
The challenge, then, is not to discard the notion of decent work but to rescue it from abstraction and moral grandstanding. This requires a parrhesiastic posture: courage to tell inconvenient truths, particularly about how concepts that promise liberation may carry the residue of domination. It is about reclaiming these concepts from their institutional confines and rerooting them in the lived realities of those historically excluded from their promises. This requires listening to subaltern voices, validating indigenous knowledge, and crafting labour policies that are not only inclusive in form but also transformative in substance. Decent work in the context of decoloniality, in this sense, is not merely critical; it is reconstructive. It opens space for reimagining work as a site of human dignity grounded in relationality, history, and justice.
Only through such an approach can we envision a truly universal concept of decent work: one that neither imposes sameness nor glorifies difference but recognises the human in every particular and the particular in every human. The South African experience offers both a warning and a possibility. It shows how universal ideals can be weaponised through coloniality but also how they can be reclaimed through resistance, memory, and solidarity. Decent work, redefined through the lens of decoloniality and the CA, can become not a tool of regulation but a pathway to rehumanisation.
Only then can we meet the need for a paradigm shift, not by erasing difference but by building a new epistemological ecosystem where multiple truths coexist and inform each other in the shared pursuit of justice and dignity in the world of work.
A Capability Approach
The previous section focused on the decolonial lens and demonstrated how it is impossible to imagine organised and decent work in contemporary South Africa without recognising the historical moorings and multitude of processes that characterise this history. This section explores the CA and how this approach, together with the decolonial approach, may cross-fertilise the pursuit of universal values of decent work that may shape policy in a global context.
The CA, as advanced by Sen [Reference Sen43] and Nussbaum [Reference Nussbaum46], is a normative framework focused on expanding individuals’ freedoms to do and be what they have reason to value. It centres on human flourishing and dignity, arguing that social arrangements should support people’s capabilities, the real opportunities they have to pursue meaningful lives. This approach has gained prominence in discussions of decent work, sustainable development, and social justice, including the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 8 (SDG 8), which aims to promote productive employment and decent work for all [47].
Despite its global uptake, the CA has faced criticism – particularly from decolonial and critical scholars – for being overly individualistic, universalist, and insufficiently contextual [Reference Deneulin48, Reference Maldonado-Torres49]. However, such critiques risk misrepresenting the framework. While the CA emphasises individual agency, it does not isolate individuals from their social, political, or historical contexts. In contrast, it explicitly acknowledges that capabilities are shaped by relational structures such as institutions, culture, and power dynamics [Reference Nussbaum46, Reference Robeyns50]. Education and health, for instance, are recognised not only as individual achievements but also as preconditions for future agency, forming a recursive loop where the outcomes of one cycle become the (individual and contextual) inputs of the next [Reference Sen42, Reference Alkire51].
The CA’s emphasis on transformation, emancipation, and structural change aligns closely with broader social justice goals. It is not merely descriptive but deeply normative and interventionist, seeking to reshape social realities to enhance substantive freedoms. Therefore, the convergence with the decolonial lens is striking. For example, both theories can deepen conversations if our epistemological positions pursue acts of solidarity, connectedness, and collective attempts at social transformation guided by an emergent understanding of historical constraints and possibilities.
In this sense, parrhesia – the act of courageous truth-telling in the face of power – is not an external supplement to either the CA or decolonial thinking but a constitutive feature of it. Speaking truth to unjust systems and advocating for dignity, equity, and inclusion are embedded in the CA’s as well as in decolonial ethical commitments [Reference Foucault6, Reference Mbembe52].
Critiques that dismiss the CA as Western or Eurocentric often overlook its flexibility and openness to plural conceptions of the good (see Chapter 5). While universalist in aspiration, the CA explicitly rejects imposing a single model of development. Instead, it provides a procedural framework in which locally valued capabilities can be identified in context [Reference Sen and Brooks45, Reference Nussbaum46]. As such, it can be mobilised to support decolonial struggles that seek epistemic justice and self-determination.
Recent policy reversals across various global contexts – including rollbacks on affirmative action and the erosion of labour protection – have intensified anxieties around justice, equity, and human dignity. These developments stand in stark contrast to the ILO’s Decent Work Agenda, which emphasises equity, non-discrimination, and freedom of association [53], and to the broader SDGs [47]. In this context, the CA offers an important lens for evaluating systemic exclusions and for reclaiming the human in work.
In the spirit of epistemic humility and global dialogue, the CA can be enriched by insights from decolonial thought. Traditions from indigenous, African, and feminist epistemologies emphasise community, reciprocity, and interconnectedness – values not foreign to the CA but entirely compatible with its emphasis on relational well-being. When mobilised alongside the CA, decolonial critique deepens the analysis of power and historical injustice, whereas the CA contributes a normative scaffold for imagining concrete pathways of change.
Interconnected Histories and the Work of Eric Wolf
This relational understanding of justice and the connection, apart from the parrhesia aspect, between the CA and decolonial thinking finds a strong historical basis in the work of Eric Wolf [Reference Wolf54], who warned against the fragmentation of disciplines and the isolation of human societies from broader systemic contexts. In Europe and the People without History, Wolf argues that humankind constitutes “a totality of interconnected processes” and that scholarly inquiries that disassemble this totality into separate parts – without reassembling them – present a “false reality” [Reference Wolf54]. He critiques how economics, for instance, became severed from social and political life, reducing production to market transactions and erasing the relational foundations of human organisation [Reference Wolf54].
Wolf’s critique resonates with the connection between the CA and decolonial thinking in at least three principal ways:
Challenging Fragmentation. Both Wolf and the CA reject siloed analysis. The CA calls for the integration of economic, political, and social dimensions of development to understand how freedoms are expanded or constrained. This resonates with decolonial critiques of Western epistemology, which expose how colonial knowledge systems fragmented and depoliticised the lives of the colonised. Therefore, like Wolf, the CA and decolonial thought both resist reductive, siloed approaches and argue for contextual, relational, and historically embedded understandings of well-being and justice.
Restoring Agency to the Marginalised. Wolf restores historical agency to the so-called people without history, showing how non-European societies actively shaped global transformations. The CA likewise centres agency – not as abstract autonomy but as the real ability to act meaningfully in the world. Similarly, decolonial thought insists on valuing epistemologies from the Global South and recognising the historical silencing of colonised peoples.
All these frameworks call for the recovery of voice and recognition for historically marginalised actors.
Critiquing Eurocentric Models of Development. Wolf’s work helps explain why Western-centric development thinking fails: it is based on the false idea that Europe developed autonomously and linearly, and others must ‘catch up’. This critique is echoed in the CA’s call to focus on plural, locally relevant values of well-being, not just GDP or modernisation and decolonial demands for development rooted in local knowledge and values.
Together, these approaches advocate for a post-universalist, context-sensitive vision of justice and development.
Eric Wolf’s book, in sum, provides a historical–materialist critique of Western knowledge systems and shows how global inequality was actively produced through interconnected processes. His work aligns with the emphasis on agency in the CA. It can help ground the CA historically and align it with decolonial concerns about voice, epistemic justice, and the rehumanisation of those written out of dominant histories.
To conclude this section, the CA – far from being Eurocentric or overly individualistic – offers a dynamic, context-sensitive, and justice-oriented framework that aligns with the core concerns of decolonial thought. Both perspectives call for truth-telling (parrhesia) in the face of structural injustice, and both foreground the agency, dignity, and futures of those who have long been excluded from dominant narratives of development.
The CA is most important when every individual has been ushered into the human zone and not ‘thingified’ and removed from the structural curse of being eternal hewers of wood, drawers of water, doing chores for those in the zone of being, tillers of the soil, permanent immigrants, and diggers of mines who are not heard or covered by well-meaning human proclamations. Cathedral builders and not merely stonecutters in the terminology of the anecdote this book started with.
Practical Implications
This chapter underscores that decent work, when viewed through the combined lens of decoloniality and the CA, must be reclaimed from abstraction and rooted in lived realities. Practical implications can be formulated on four levels:
Policy and Regulation. Labour policies and empowerment frameworks (e.g., B-BBEE, public works programmes, and platform regulation) should be evaluated and redesigned on the basis of their impact on workers’ capabilities rather than formal compliance alone. Procurement, just transition policies, and minimum wage systems should be tied explicitly to the expansion of capabilities such as voice, agency, and security.
Organisations and Social Partners. Employers, unions, and professional bodies can operationalise this by instituting capability audits and incorporating paresthesia mechanisms – safe, structured opportunities for truth-telling without retaliation – into workplace governance. Such measures would transform diversity and inclusion programmes into genuine practices of co-creation.
Workplace Practice. At the micro level, occupational health and career services should integrate capability-oriented tools into counselling and case management, ensuring that workers’ agency, voice, and dignity are central in pathways to sustainable employability. Community forums for decent work could further institutionalise participatory dialogue.
Measurement and Accountability. New tools such as capability impact assessments and conscio-hierarchality audits are needed to reveal structural conversion barriers (e.g., commuting burdens and racialised job segregation). These instruments complement existing compliance-based monitoring and restore attention to substantive freedoms (see Chapter 4).
Future Research
The argument advanced in this chapter also opens several lines for further scholarly inquiry:
Conceptual Development. More work is needed to articulate contextual universalism in decent work – a framework that identifies core freedoms while allowing contextual variation. Similarly, theorising parrhesia as a workplace right deserves systematic exploration.
Measurement and Methods. Future studies should co-create decolonial capability indices that reflect workers’ situated realities in the Global South. The development of valid measures of conscio-hierarchality would allow researchers to capture how historical hierarchies translate into contemporary work-related inequalities.
Policy and Organisational Evaluation. Rigorous impact evaluations of redesigned public works programmes, B-BBEE reforms, and capability-based procurement practices can provide evidence of what truly enhances worker freedoms. Longitudinal research on platform workers and mining communities could illuminate how labour regimes evolve under globalisation and climate transitions.
Historical and Comparative Studies. Further archival and ethnographic research is needed to trace how colonial and apartheid logics persist in labour institutions. Comparative studies across Global North and South contexts may reveal the institutional conversion factors that most effectively expand capabilities under resource constraints.
These implications and research directions aim to move the discourse on decent work beyond compliance and rhetoric. By embedding parrhesia, epistemic justice, and capability expansion into both scholarship and practice, decent work can be reimagined as a site of rehumanisation and solidarity rather than regulation alone.
Conclusion: Pathways to Universal Conceptions of Decent Work
It cannot be overstated that work plays a crucial role in the global economy and in personal development. Owing to technological developments, the effects of pandemics such as COVID-19, outsourcing, and other geopolitical changes, decent work has even become more important. However, what cannot be ignored is that in the Global South, the genealogy of work is laced with mechanisms of domination, dehumanisation, and expropriation and the logic that currently guides workplace relations. An alien idea of work was imposed upon people whose identity, culture, and humanity were eroded, and white supremacy was forced into their way of life. These injustices may not only shape policies but also form the practices in society today. We have argued that the decolonial epistemic lens and the CA are applicable theories that are sensitive to deep structural issues without claiming superiority to Eurocentric epistemes. We have also suggested that decent work should not be premised on profit nor should it ignore dehumanisation, but it must be produced in an economic, political, and ideological system that facilitates a singular humanity. In this spirit, we propose several frameworks.
First, building from Eric Wolf’s argument of the singular logic of modernity/coloniality, we propose that things and events must be understood as interconnected [Reference Wolf54]. To understand social phenomena, we need to place them in a historical context. As noted by Aimé Césaire, the universal should be enriched by that which is particular [Reference Césaire and Edwards1]. For example, the historical circumstances of apartheid and dispossession in South Africa are not in isolation. The internal South African contradictions are a product of a larger global history of modernity/coloniality. Therefore, universal understandings of decent work can emerge only when this interconnectedness is recognised and history is understood as part of a broader, evolving global power structure.
Second, in the workplace, there should be awareness of its historical position. The workplace in South Africa inherits a legacy of injustices, as demonstrated in the chapter. Diversity and inclusion, without paying attention to colonial roots and structures, may be insufficient for transformative and distributary objectives. Important in this respect is the concept of conscio-hierarchality [Reference Ngwenya and Bohman55]. This concept calls for a heightened awareness of one’s social and psychological positioning within the global hierarchy of being, a construct rooted in the historical and ongoing structures of modernity/coloniality. This hierarchy stratifies individuals according to intersecting categories such as race, gender, class, sexuality, and religion, elevating the European, capitalist, patriarchal, white, and heterosexual subject as the normative ideal [Reference Maldonado-Torres49]. As an interdisciplinary intervention, conscio-hierarchality challenges dominant ways of knowing and being that underpin interpersonal, institutional, and economic relations. It is particularly relevant to contemporary discussions on well-being and decent work – as in this book – as it reveals how structural inequalities shape access to dignity, opportunity, and psychological flourishing.
From a psychological standpoint, conscio-hierarchality affirms the human subject as inherently valuable, deserving of respect and voice beyond ascribed social identities such as ‘migrant’, ‘disabled’, or ‘low-skilled worker’. This aligns with psychological frameworks that link subjective well-being to autonomy, recognition, and inclusion. However, it also highlights the limitations of individual-level interventions when systemic barriers such as racism, ableism, and economic precarity remain unaddressed.
The concept thus critiques how modern institutions, including labour markets, reproduce inequality by framing cultural and social differences through a deficit lens. It stresses that oppression is intersectional and that individuals experience exclusion and exploitation across multiple axes, such as being black, queer, working class, or undocumented. Such positionalities profoundly influence access to decent work, defined not only by fair income and safe conditions but also by respect, agency, and psychological safety in the workplace.
Conscio-hierarchality, therefore, calls for a shift in how well-being and labour are conceptualised: from individual performance and productivity to collective dignity and structural equity. It challenges dominant economic and policy discourses that overlook the historical and cultural dimensions of labour and instead privilege epistemologies that centre relationality, community, and lived experience. This includes valuing situated knowledge that speaks from the margins and challenges the universality of Western paradigms. Ultimately, by recognising and disrupting the epistemic and structural foundations of inequality, conscio-hierarchality enables more inclusive understandings of well-being and decent work, grounded in justice, contextual sensitivity, and the rehumanisation of labour.
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