The Institutional Work of Exploitation: Employers’ Work to Create and Perpetuate Inequality

Social inequality is underpinned by exploitative labour institutions, yet the agency of employers in establishing and maintaining such institutions remains underexplored. We thus adopt the lens of institutional work in analysing South African mining employers’ purposive efforts to ensure reliable access to cheap labour from the 1860s through until the infamous Marikana Massacre in 2012. We find that while labour is scarce, employers engage in forcing: creating exploitative institutional devices through conscripting and controlling. But as labour becomes abundant (and political winds shift), employers engage in freeing: liberalizing institutional controls to give workers ‘choice’, while simultaneously outsourcing responsibilities and costs associated with the unjust employment relationship to others, including workers themselves. We thus explain how employers purposefully create and perpetuate their advantage in interaction with labour market dynamics, contributing to our understanding of inequality and the role of actors’ intentions in impacting social systems.