The ordinary lives of crisis: transformations in the realm of work in South Africa and Romania

2020 emerged as a ‘crisis in the world of work’. Reflections upon how the pandemic would accelerate pervasive joblessness and changes in the workplace abounded, while academics and technocrats alike have translated its predicaments as a catalyst for a rapidly coming postwork future. Using illustrative vignettes from our own work on labour in South Africa and Romania, we discuss how the current labour/technology crisis has moved along structural axes of inequality and disempowerment in the world of work. We suggest that, as historians documenting the shifting nature of work and its relationship with technology, we should go against the grain when chronicling the current pandemic as a series of dramatic shifts and spectacular snapshots, and affirm non-eventful ways of writing history.