ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses union responses to privatisation in South Africa in the period from 1990 to 2001. It focuses on Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), reflecting its size and central place in the South African labour movement. COSATU has been most active with regard to mass struggles against privatisation. The responses of the union movement to privatisation can be divided into two broad periods, the first coinciding with the privatisation initiatives of the National Party Government, the second coinciding with the period since the election of the African National Congress Government. The formative years of COSATU and the rise of public-sector unionism in the late 1980s were based on struggle and coincided with campaigns against the National Party Government’s agenda of economic restructuring. Privatisation can be understood as one element of the neoliberal agenda which has its origins in the international crisis of capitalist accumulation or overproduction in the late 1970s and 1980s.
