INTRODUCTION

After months of talks between unions associated with the Trade Union Advisory Coordinating Council (TUACC), the Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU) was inaugurated on 13 April 1979. FOSATU was the first federation of predominantly unregistered trade unions with a truly national reach to operate openly in South Africa since the late 1960s.

FOSATU membership reached 140 000 in 1985 (Baskin, 1991: 49); it was ‘by far the strongest working-class organisation’ opposing apartheid in the early 1980s (Schroeder, 1988: 54). The largest strike wave since the 1940s took place in 1981, and FOSATU played an integral role (Yudelman, 1984: 271). FOSATU was also associated with the distinct radical politics of South African ‘workerism’, and had a mass base among black workers.

‘Workerism’ was widely identified as the dominant political current within FOSATU in the early 1980s (for example, Mahomed, 1984). Although workerism was not the only current in the federation, and was not restricted to FOSATU (Byrne, 2012), its core positions remain relatively unknown. This is partly because workerism was highly controversial at the time, the subject of fierce, often misleading polemics (for example, Toussaint, 1983; Comrades in Africa, 1984; Nhere, 1984; Nyawuza, 1985). Coupled with a lack of dedicated studies of FOSATU or its affiliates, this has left workerism's actual positions largely obscured from view.