At a Glance
Underground: The Making of a Mineworkers' Leader
The gold mines of South Africa's Witwatersrand — the great reef of gold-bearing rock that runs across the southern Highveld — were the foundation on which the South African economy had been built since the 1880s, and they were, by the 1950s and 1960s when James Motlatsi came of age, one of the most elaborately controlled labour environments in the world. The migrant labour system that supplied the mines with African workers was a comprehensive apparatus of social control: workers were recruited from the bantustans and from neighbouring countries, housed in single-sex compounds on mine property, paid wages set by the Chamber of Mines at levels determined by the principle that African labour should be cheap, and sent back to their homes when their contracts expired, their families never able to join them, their lives divided between the underground world of the mine and the rural world of the bantustan.
James Motlatsi worked in this environment as a young man. He went underground. He experienced the heat and the darkness and the physical danger of gold mining — an industry in which rockfalls, gas explosions, and accidents killed and maimed mineworkers at rates that would have been considered intolerable in any other industrial context. He lived in the compounds and experienced the total employer control of his daily life that the compound system represented. He knew what it meant to be a mineworker in apartheid South Africa not from study but from experience, and when he eventually began organising in the mines, that experience was his most important credential.
The political conditions of the 1970s — the Soweto uprising of 1976, the growth of Black consciousness, the revival of the labour movement following the 1973 Durban strikes that had demonstrated African workers' capacity for collective action — created the environment in which the next phase of South African trade unionism would develop. The Wiehahn Commission of the late 1970s recommended, and the government accepted, the recognition of Black trade unions — a recognition the government hoped would channel worker militancy into manageable industrial relations rather than political confrontation, but that in fact created the legal space within which unions like the NUM would build the most powerful organised labour movement in South African history.
Building the NUM: Organisation in the Compound World
The founding of the National Union of Mineworkers in 1982 was a project that required exceptional organisational skill and exceptional personal courage. The mining industry had operated without Black unions for a century. The Chamber of Mines and the mining houses had sophisticated systems for maintaining control of their workforces, including the compound system itself — which gave employers almost total surveillance of workers' movements and communications — and a long history of using dismissal, deportation, and violence to suppress labour organising.
James Motlatsi as president and Cyril Ramaphosa as general secretary built the NUM against this backdrop. Their partnership was one of complementary strengths: Ramaphosa was the strategic thinker and the negotiator, the man who navigated the legal and political environment and who became one of the most skilled labour lawyers in the country; Motlatsi was the organiser with direct mining experience, the president who could speak to mineworkers from inside their own experience and whose credibility on the shop floor was beyond question. Together they built something that had never existed before: a Black trade union that genuinely represented the people who worked the mines that made the South African economy function.
The growth of the NUM in its early years was extraordinary. Workers had been waiting for an organisation that could represent them, and once the NUM demonstrated that it would fight for workers' interests — that it could win improvements in wages and conditions, that it would not be intimidated by the mining houses or by the state — membership flooded in. By the mid-1980s the NUM was the largest single trade union in South Africa, with a membership that gave it both the resources to function effectively and the organisational weight to be a major political actor in the mass democratic movement.
COSATU: The Federation That Changed the Political Landscape
The founding of the Congress of South African Trade Unions in November 1985 was one of the most significant developments in the history of the South African labour movement. COSATU brought together the major independent unions — the NUM, the Metal and Allied Workers Union, the Transport and General Workers Union, and many others — into a federation that could coordinate the labour movement's response to apartheid across industrial sectors and that could speak with authority on political as well as industrial questions.
The political significance of COSATU's founding was enormous. The federation aligned itself with the banned ANC and with the United Democratic Front — the internal umbrella organisation that brought together anti-apartheid organisations across the country — and declared that the liberation of South African workers required not just improvements in wages and working conditions but the end of the apartheid system itself. COSATU was not merely a labour federation pursuing the industrial interests of its members within the existing political system. It was part of the liberation movement, and its power — the power of hundreds of thousands of organised workers who could bring the economy to a halt — was deployed in the service of the political as well as the industrial struggle.
James Motlatsi's role in COSATU's founding and early development was central. The NUM was the federation's largest affiliate, and Motlatsi's authority within COSATU was commensurate with his union's size and with the organisational experience he brought to its leadership. COSATU's stayaways and political strikes of the 1980s — the two-million-worker stayaway of May 1986, the strikes against the state of emergency — were demonstrations of organised labour power that the apartheid government had not anticipated and that changed the political calculations of both the government and the international community watching from outside.
The 1987 Strike: The Greatest Labour Confrontation in South African History
The 1987 mineworkers' strike was the most dramatic and the most significant single labour action in South African history. It began on 9 August 1987 — National Women's Day, the anniversary of the 1956 Women's March — and involved 340,000 workers across the gold and coal mines in a direct confrontation with the Chamber of Mines over wages, working conditions, leave pay, and the management of the compound system.
The strike lasted three weeks. It was a confrontation between two of the most powerful forces in South African economic life: the mining industry, which generated the bulk of South Africa's foreign exchange earnings and whose profits underpinned the economic model on which the apartheid state depended, and the organised mineworkers, whose labour made those profits possible and whose collective action could stop the mines from functioning. For three weeks the mines were largely shut. The economic cost was enormous, and the political implications were equally significant: the strike demonstrated that the workforce holding the key to the South African economy was organised, militant, and capable of sustained collective action on a scale the Chamber of Mines had not believed possible.
The strike ended in what was formally a defeat for the union. The Chamber of Mines dismissed approximately 50,000 workers — a massive act of retaliation that reflected the mining industry's determination to reassert control — and the settlement the NUM eventually reached fell short of its original demands. James Motlatsi had to lead his union through the painful process of accepting those terms and rebuilding after the dismissals. It required exactly the combination of realism and continuing commitment that distinguished the best of South African labour leadership.
But the significance of the 1987 strike was never primarily its immediate outcome. It was the demonstration it provided of what organised South African workers could do — and the lesson it taught the mining industry and the government about the long-term costs of refusing to engage seriously with the labour movement's demands. The strike confirmed, if confirmation were needed, that the South African economy could not function without the cooperation of its Black workforce, and that the apartheid system's suppression of that workforce's political and economic rights was not simply unjust but ultimately unsustainable.
The Labour Movement as Liberation Movement
One of the most important aspects of James Motlatsi's leadership of the NUM and his role in COSATU was his consistent articulation of the connection between the labour movement and the liberation struggle. He was not a trade unionist who confined himself to industrial matters and left the politics to others. He understood that the conditions of South African mineworkers — their wages, their housing, their safety, their family life, their relationship to the compound system — were inseparable from the political structures of apartheid, and that improving those conditions permanently required dismantling those structures.
This understanding shaped the NUM's approach to its work and its relationship to the broader liberation movement. The union's political strikes and stayaways were not departures from its core mission but expressions of it. The alliance with the ANC and the UDF was not an external political attachment but an integral part of the union's strategy for achieving the conditions its members needed. And the COSATU federation, with its explicit commitment to the national democratic revolution alongside the transformation of industrial relations, was the institutional expression of the analysis that Motlatsi and others had developed through years of organising in the mines.
Legacy: Labour Power and the Architecture of Liberation
James Motlatsi's contribution to the South African liberation struggle was the contribution of the labour movement at its most powerful and its most politically conscious. He built an institution — the NUM — that represented hundreds of thousands of South African workers who had never before had effective collective representation. He led that institution through its most important confrontation with the mining industry. He helped build the federation — COSATU — that made the labour movement a central pillar of the mass democratic movement. And he did all of this from a foundation of direct personal experience of the mining industry, which gave his leadership an authenticity that no secondhand knowledge could have provided.
The democratic South Africa that emerged from the negotiations of the early 1990s was shaped by many forces, and the labour movement was one of the most important of them. COSATU's power — the power that Motlatsi and others had built through the 1980s — gave the ANC negotiating team leverage in the transition talks, and it ensured that the new constitution took seriously the rights and interests of working people. That outcome was not inevitable. It was the product of decades of organisational work, of strategic leadership, of willingness to risk everything on strikes that could be defeated and campaigns that could be crushed. James Motlatsi was one of the people who did that work and took those risks, and the South Africa that emerged from the transition bears, in its labour legislation and its constitutional provisions for workers' rights, the enduring traces of what he and his union built.