Southern Africa perspective - In South Africa: The Bloody Campaign Against Organized Labor
Item
- Title
- Southern Africa perspective - In South Africa: The Bloody Campaign Against Organized Labor
- Creator
- COSATU
- Date
- 1991
- 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
- Language
- English
- Type
- text
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/169033
- Archive
- Cory Library for Humanitites Research
- Provenance
- The item is held at the Cory Library for Humanities Research, Rhodes University, on behalf of the Labour Research Service
- Extent
- 3 pages
- Rights
- Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU)
- Rights Holder
- Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU)
- Use/re-use
- The materials are made available explicitly for research and educational purposes. Any use of these materials must be cleared with the Labour Research Service.
- Item sets
- General Materials
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