South Africa: The Union That Helped End Apartheid, Then Joined the Government

by bam

Apartheid South Africa put Black workers outside labor law by name: the Industrial Conciliation Act of 1924 wrote them out of the word "employee," a 1953 statute criminalised their strikes, and "job reservation" saved the best jobs for white workers by law, the bluntest version of the exclusion move this track finds in country after country. This course follows what the excluded built anyway: the leaderless Durban strikes of 1973, the shop-steward unions that became COSATU in 1985 (about 460,000 members at launch, South African History Online), the three-week miners' strike of 1987, and the Tripartite Alliance with the ANC that helped end apartheid in 1994. Then it follows the harder story after the victory. The Labour Relations Act 66 of 1995 is among the most worker-friendly statutes anywhere, written partly by the unionists who had just won, and yet official unemployment stands at 32.9% (Q1 2025, Stats SA), labor broking moves workers outside the paper protections, and on 16 August 2012 police of the democratic state shot dead 34 striking miners at Marikana. That day is taught soberly, from the published findings of the Farlam Commission, what it found, what it did not find, and what is still unresolved, dated and left open. The course ends with the fracture the alliance produced, NUMSA expelled in 2014, the rival SAFTU federation founded in 2017, and with a question borrowed from this track's Poland course, offered and not answered: can a union movement win the state without losing the workplace? Cited to South African History Online, the statutes themselves, Stats SA, the ILO and the Marikana Commission report. A country course in the Workers' Rights track, take "The History of Unions: America and the World" first.