A distinction has generally been made between the producer and the consumer … we have been led to suppose that the producer and the consumer were totally separate individuals, with separate and distinct interests, when in reality all producers are consumers.

The elaborate “remaking” of the African working class that took off in earnest in the period after 1945 has only recently begun to receive the attention of scholars working on African labor and working-class history. This process of remaking, as in nineteenth-century England, essentially involved the incorporation of the African working class into a system of industrial relations which would guarantee it a stake in society with regard to jobs, wages, housing, and general working conditions.

In April of 1983, the Chilean copper miners'confederation (the Confederación de Trabajadores de Cobre, or CTC), representing 26,000 copper workers, called for a general strike in Chile's copper mines and for a day of national protest against the military regime of Augusto Pinochet.