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Precarious Collaborations. Working-Class Subjectivities, Community Activism, And The Problem With “Social Movement Unionism” In Late-Apartheid East Rand (South Africa), Franco Barchiesi, Bridget Kenny

Franco Barchiesi

An influential current in South African labor studies has used the concept of ‘social movement unionism’ to characterize organized labor’s contribution to South Africa’s post-Apartheid democratization. Part of the concept of social movement unionism is the idea that during the 1980s independent black workers’ unions combined workplace struggles with community-based concerns related to social services, repression, and political disenfranchisement. In this way, trade unions came to play a politically transformative role, which implied both innovative labor-community alliances and the appropriation by organized labor of social movements’ mobilizing modalities. After a decline in the immediate post-Apartheid period, when scholars and union …