Southern Africa perspective - In South Africa: The Bloody Campaign Against Organized Labor

Title: Southern Africa perspective - In South Africa: The Bloody Campaign Against Organized Labor
Creator: COSATU
Subject: COSATU
Date Issued: 1991
Date: 1991
Type: text
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/169033
Identifier: vital:41677
Description: A year after African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, South Africa’s Black trade unions, particularly the million-member Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), remain at the heart of the movement for political democracy and economic and social change. Union activists have been instrumental in revitalizing mass opposition to apartheid — launching ANC branches, organizing local consumer and utility boycotts, and leading strikes over wages, job security and workplace racism that cost the white-run economy over four million work days during 1990. But labor’s role in the struggle for political and economic democracy has increasingly made the unions the target of state-sponsored political violence. Black labor’s resistance to oppression goes back to the 1920s, when the militant Industrial and Commercial Workers Union built a national membership of over 100,000. But it was not until 1981, after a wave of illegal strikes forced the apartheid regime to lift the ban on Black unions, that labor began to emerge as a major anti-apartheid force. With Mandela’s African National Congress and other organizations still outlawed, Black workers increasingly saw their unions as a vehicle for their political aspirations.
Format: 3 pages
Format: pdf
Publisher: Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU)
Language: English
Rights: Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU)
Rights: No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior permission from the publisher

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