Women in the forefront of workplace struggles in South Africa: From invisibility to mobilization

This article highlights the involvement of women in workplace struggles in the 1970s and early 1980s, a period of significant worker uprisings in the history of South Africa's industrial relations system. Workers demanded changes in the workplace, prompting a re-emergence of black trade union activism and they went further, challenging the political system through protests against apartheid. I argue that women played leading roles in organising fellow workers' and founding trade unions within various workplaces and, like their male counterparts, were equally motivated to change wages and working conditions, often put forward as the key to male workers' motivation for trade union mobilisation. However, for African women, their mobilisation had a different dynamic as they faced the additional discrimination of both race and gender.