COSATU and the Trade Unions
How organized labor became the backbone of the anti-apartheid struggle inside South Africa.
The Weapon the State Could Not Ban
By the 1970s, the apartheid government had banned every significant anti-apartheid political organization. The ANC, the PAC, the Communist Party — all were driven underground or into exile. But there was one form of organized resistance the government could not easily suppress: trade unions. The economy depended on Black labor, and workers who organized around wages and conditions had a leverage that purely political organizations lacked.
The turning point came with the Durban strikes of 1973, when over 100,000 Black workers in the Durban industrial area launched a wave of wildcat strikes. The strikers had no formal union organization — Black trade unions were effectively illegal. Yet the scale of the action forced employers and the government to negotiate. Within a few years, the government was compelled to legalize Black trade unions through the Wiehahn Commission reforms of 1979, calculating that it was better to channel labor militancy into legal structures than to face ungovernable wildcat action.