Silent resistance in South Africa's taxi ranks — the hidden economy of ‘imali yesokisi'

Daily Maverick

28-05-2025

The taxi industry is the backbone of South Africa's public transport system, yet it operates in a legal and economic grey zone. Drivers endure brutal hours, poverty wages and constant insecurity.
In the bustling, diesel-scented chaos of South Africa's minibus taxi ranks, thousands of drivers navigate more than just traffic. They endure low wages, gruelling hours and the ever-present threat of dismissal in an industry that is essential to our public transport system but deeply informal and exploitative.
Amid this, a quiet form of resistance has emerged – one as ingenious as it is desperate. It is called imali yesokisi, or 'socks money', and it speaks volumes about life on the precarious edge of the country's labour market.
Imali yesokisi refers to a widespread practice among taxi drivers: after meeting the daily revenue target imposed by taxi owners – usually about R1,000 – drivers pocket any extra income they earn and hide it in their socks.
It's a silent act of defiance against an exploitative system. In a sector where unions are all but absent, and protections are few and far between, imali yesokisi is a symbol of agency, however small, in a world that offers little in the way of security or fairness.
The minibus taxi industry moves more people than trains and buses combined. It's the lifeblood of urban and peri-urban transport in South Africa.
But it is also a space of profound inequality. Drivers work without contracts, have no access to benefits like leave or medical aid and often get paid below even the meagre minimum wage set by the sectoral determination for the taxi industry.
Interviews with drivers at the Bree, Noord, Wanderers and Faraday taxi ranks in Johannesburg reveal a grim picture. Many drivers earn less than R500 per week, despite working 12- to 16-hour shifts. Some are paid solely on commission, with income fluctuating wildly.
As one driver put it: 'My salary fluctuates every week. One week, I am given R500, and the other week, less than this or more.'
This instability isn't accidental. It is baked into the structure of the industry, designed to shift risk and cost onto workers. Taxi owners demand daily returns without absorbing any of the volatility in passenger numbers, fuel prices or traffic delays. The result is an unrelenting pressure on drivers to hustle, to overload, to break rules – all while barely scraping by.
In this bleak landscape, imali yesokisi emerges as a quiet form of protest and survival. By hiding a small portion of their earnings, drivers assert control over at least a sliver of their labour's value. One driver explained: 'We resort to imali yesokisi because we are underpaid. Without it, we would not survive.'
This hidden income isn't just about immediate needs. It's a buffer against the next emergency, the next illness, the next dry day at the rank.
It's also a symbolic reclaiming of agency. These drivers aren't simply victims; they're workers who have found a way – albeit a risky one – to assert their right to a fair return for their work.
It is crucial to understand that imali yesokisi is not greed or theft. It is compensation in a system that routinely denies taxi drivers their fair share.
It is also a survival mechanism in an environment where open resistance is often met with swift punishment. As one Satawu (South African Transport and Allied Workers' Union) organiser noted, 'some drivers ask us not to tell their bosses they belong to a union. They are scared of losing their jobs.'
Fear silences many. The sock becomes the safest place to speak.
But imali yesokisi is no solution. It's a plaster on a haemorrhage. It helps individual drivers cope, but it doesn't change the structure that keeps them poor. It's not collective action. It's not policy change. It's not justice.
The failure of unions like Satawu to gain traction in the taxi industry highlights a deep crisis in worker representation. The sector is fragmented, decentralised and often violently resistant to outside scrutiny.
Taxi owners and associations wield immense power and attempts to organise drivers are frequently met with intimidation or outright threats. The result is an industry with almost no mechanisms for accountability or negotiation.
Even the sector's basic legal requirements, such as pay slips, regulated working hours, or paid leave, are routinely flouted. One Satawu coordinator lamented that most drivers earn below the legal minimum wage of about R8,000 and have no access to any of the benefits outlined in the sectoral determination.
'There is no leave, no pay slip, no paternity leave,' he said. 'No one benefits from what is written on paper.'
The exploitation of taxi drivers is not new. It is rooted in the apartheid-era deregulation of the taxi industry which saw owners accumulate wealth while workers were left with the risks. Post-apartheid governments have failed to formalise or regulate the sector effectively, leaving it trapped in a liminal space: too essential to ignore, too unruly to reform.
Academic research points to this system as a textbook example of 'labour precarity' – a condition marked by insecurity, low pay and a lack of basic rights. Taxi drivers epitomise the 'precariat': a growing class of workers who are always hustling, always vulnerable and always one missed shift away from crisis.
As legal scholar Tayyab Mahmud notes, the precariat is born not only from insecure contracts but from 'capital's capture of life itself' – a condition where workers' bodies, time and energy are relentlessly exploited for someone else's gain.
In South Africa's taxi ranks, that capture is visible every day: in the exhausted eyes of drivers who've been behind the wheel since 4am; in the silence of marshals too scared to speak out; and in the furtive tug of socks hiding cash no one must see.
The status quo is not inevitable. Formalising the taxi industry is not easy – but it is necessary. The government must move beyond lip service and invest in meaningful regulation that centres the rights of workers, not just the efficiency of transport.
This includes enforcing sectoral wage laws, requiring formal contracts and holding taxi associations accountable for exploitative practices.
It also means supporting unions and worker-led organisations to do the difficult work of organising in hostile terrain. Innovative approaches – such as mobile union clinics, legal aid booths at taxi ranks or WhatsApp-based organising – may offer ways to build solidarity where traditional models have failed.
More broadly, South Africa must stop treating informal workers as invisible. The millions who work outside formal employment structures – from taxi drivers to domestic workers to waste pickers – are not anomalies. They are the backbone of our economy. They deserve protection, respect and a voice.
There is something profoundly human about imali yesokisi. It is secretive, yes, but not because it is shameful. It is secret because it is dangerous.
In that sock lies defiance. In that sock lies dignity. In that sock lies the quiet refusal to accept a system that offers no fairness and no future.
The practice of imali yesokisi – money hidden in socks – reveals far more than just the financial struggles of South Africa's minibus taxi drivers. It is a microcosm of systemic exploitation, a quiet rebellion against an industry built on precarity, and a desperate act of survival in an economy that offers workers little protection.
While this hidden economy allows drivers to reclaim a sliver of agency, it is ultimately a symptom of a much deeper crisis: the failure of labour regulation, the absence of worker solidarity and the state's neglect of the informal sector.
The taxi industry is the backbone of South Africa's public transport system, yet it operates in a legal and economic grey zone. Drivers endure brutal hours, poverty wages and constant insecurity, all while bearing the risks of fluctuating passenger demand, rising fuel costs and police harassment.
The fact that imali yesokisi has become a widespread coping mechanism underscores the industry's fundamental injustice – workers are forced to steal from themselves because the system denies them a fair share of their labour's value.
Yet, this individual resistance is not enough. Imali yesokisi may help drivers survive another day, but it does not challenge the structural forces that keep them trapped in exploitation.
The lack of unionisation, the intimidation of worker organisers, and the government's failure to enforce labour laws all perpetuate this cycle. The taxi industry's deregulated, fragmented nature makes collective action difficult, but not impossible.
If real change is to come, it must involve stronger worker mobilisation, stricter state oversight and a reimagining of labour rights in the informal economy.
The South African government cannot continue to ignore the plight of taxi drivers. Meaningful reform must include:
Enforcing existing labour laws – ensuring minimum wages, regulated working hours and basic benefits such as sick leave;
Formalising employment contracts so that drivers are no longer subject to arbitrary dismissals or fluctuating incomes;
Supporting worker organising by protecting unionised drivers from retaliation and creating safe spaces for collective bargaining; and
Holding taxi associations accountable through audits, penalties for wage theft and transparent revenue-sharing models.
Beyond policy, there must be a shift in how informal workers are perceived. Taxi drivers, like domestic workers and street vendors, are not marginal figures – they are essential to the economy. Their labour deserves dignity, fair compensation and legal recognition.
Imali yesokisi is more than just hidden cash – it is a silent scream for justice. It is a testament to the resilience of workers who refuse to be completely crushed by an unjust system.
But resilience alone is not liberation. South Africa must move beyond survival strategies and confront the systemic exploitation that makes such resistance necessary.
The money in the sock is a temporary fix; what drivers truly need is a future where they no longer have to hide their earnings just to survive.
Until then, the taxi ranks will remain spaces of quiet defiance where the rustle of a sock speaks louder than any protest chant and where the struggle for dignity continues, one hidden rand at a time. DM
Dr Siyabulela Christopher Fobosi is a senior researcher at the University of Fort Hare, where he contributes to advancing interdisciplinary human rights research and education. He is an internationally recognised and experienced sociologist in public transport matters.
This article is based on research conducted across several major taxi ranks in Johannesburg, where more than 50 interviews were carried out with taxi drivers, marshals and owners. Several peer-reviewed journal articles based on this research have been published and are available on Google Scholar.