A giant is born - again: COSATU at 40 in the age of algorithms

Key topics:COSATU’s historic role in ending apartheid and advancing worker rightsChallenges of inequality, unemployment, corruption and declining union influenceRenewal in the age of AI through moral courage, inclusivity and new organising methods.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Jay Naidoo.On 1 December 1985, in a packed hall at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, a giant was born.Cyril Ramaphosa, then General Secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers and now President of South Africa, chaired the launch congress of the Congress of South African Trade Unions. “A giant is born today,” he told us. “It will challenge all who stand in its path.” The next day our newly elected president Elijah Barayi, a mineworker from Carletonville, stood up with no written speech and gave apartheid’s P.W. Botha six months to abolish the pass laws, release Nelson Mandela and all political prisoners, and unban the ANC and all banned organisations.I stood there as the first General Secretary of that giant. We had no offices, no staff, no bank account. But we had something more powerful than money or buildings: a clear moral compass and the trust of millions of workers who believed that unity could change history.To understand what that meant, we must place COSATU in a longer human story.When feudalism began to crumble and the Industrial Revolution rose from its ashes, the world gained machines but lost community. Peasants were driven from the land into dark factories and slums. Children worked twelve hours a day. Women were paid a fraction of men. Families were torn apart. The new gospel of “progress” came with soot in the lungs and hunger in the belly.Trade unions were born out of that pain. They were an act of rebellion and an act of love. Workers discovered that alone they were disposable, but together they were a force. Without unions, the story of the last two centuries would be very different. We would not have the eight hour day, paid leave, safety standards, pensions, social insurance, protections for women and children, and the idea that labour is not a commodity but the life of a human being with dignity.COSATU walked into that global tradition and gave it an African voice.It helped break the backbone of apartheid through mass strikes and stay aways. It helped write a democratic Constitution that enshrined the right to organise and to strike. It fought for labour laws that gave farmworkers, domestic workers and casual workers protections they had never known. It pushed for a national minimum wage and helped shape social protection, from pensions and child grants to unemployment insurance and workplace safety. On these fronts, the giant did not disappoint..But an anniversary is not only a celebration. It is also a mirror.If we imagine COSATU as a 40 year old person, we must ask hard questions. Has this giant lifted the burden of poverty from workers’ shoulders or broken the curse of mass unemployment? Has it helped to deracialise an economy still dominated by a small elite? Has it been a consistent force against corruption, even when corruption wore the colours of its political allies?Democratic South Africa is not the country of pass laws that Elijah Barayi confronted. Millions live in formal houses with water and electricity. Unionised workers are better off because they had COSATU in their corner.Yet walk through our townships and informal settlements and you will see that the promise remains unfulfilled. Unemployment has entrenched itself as a permanent feature of our society, especially for young people. Inequality remains obscene. Ownership of land and productive assets is still concentrated in the hands of a few. Corruption has hollowed out state institutions and sabotaged programmes meant to uplift the poor. Many of those scandals unfolded while COSATU’s ally, the ANC, was in government. Too often, the federation’s voice came late or was muted by the loyalties of the alliance.Workers feel that contradiction. In its first decades COSATU grew rapidly, but in recent years its membership has shrunk. Splits, expulsions and the emergence of rival federations have weakened labour unity. Some workers still see COSATU as their shield at the bargaining table. Others see a federation too absorbed in factional politics and too distant from workplaces and communities where desperation is growing..Now another wave of history is upon us.Artificial intelligence, automation, robotics, 3D printing and platform-based work are reshaping production faster than any previous industrial revolution. The factory gate is becoming a data centre. The supervisor is becoming an algorithm. Workers are hired and fired by an app. Jobs disappear not only on the shop floor but in offices, call centres and even professional fields.Technology itself is not the enemy. The question is: who controls it, and for whose benefit? Will it deepen inequality, surveillance and exclusion, or will it free human beings from drudgery and open space for creativity and care?This is where the future of collective bargaining and unionism is decided.Unions were born to humanise work in the age of steam and steel. Today they must learn to protect human dignity in the age of data and code. That means bargaining not only over wages and hours, but over algorithms, surveillance, skills, climate transitions and ownership of the technologies that will define the future. It means organising not only the permanent worker in a big plant, but the delivery rider, the coder, the call centre agent, the care worker, the informal trader and the young person living on short term contracts.Many young workers navigate a world where “the boss” is invisible. They know precarity, not stability. No one has told them that solidarity still has power, even in a digital age. If unions seem like old buildings arguing over old rules, they will walk past. If unions become schools of democracy, compassion and courage, they might walk in.So what does renewal look like for COSATU at 40?First, it means recovering moral courage. The federation must be willing to confront corruption and bad governance wherever they sit, even when that means challenging its friends in government. The giant was not born to be a junior partner in palace politics. It was born to be the organised conscience of the working class.Second, it means shifting the centre of gravity back to the shop floor, the street and the digital platforms where people actually work and live today. Bargaining councils and summits matter, but so do the struggles of casual workers, township traders, farmworkers, care workers and the unemployed. If COSATU wants to reclaim the mantle of a people’s movement, it must open its doors to those on the margins and experiment with new forms of organisation and solidarity that fit the gig economy and the climate crisis.Third, it means giving real power to young workers and to women. Not as a favour or a quota, but because the future world of work will be built or broken on their backs. New leadership, new languages, new tools of organising are needed. The methods will change, but the principle that “an injury to one is an injury to all” must bind generations together.Above all, it means returning to the deepest roots of unionism: compassion and solidarity. The first organisers did not have PhDs in labour law. They had a simple conviction that no human being should face the factory owner or the landlord alone. That spirit is needed now more than ever in a world where social cohesion and solidarity are being flung out of the window by political and economic elites who profit from division.When Elijah Barayi gave P.W. Botha six months to scrap the pass laws, he was not only issuing an ultimatum to a racist regime. He was also expressing a deeper truth: that injustice cannot be managed politely; it must be confronted boldly..On COSATU’s 40th anniversary, the giant must turn a similar challenge on itself. Are we still the force that frightened apartheid, or have we become too comfortable in the corridors of power? Are we prepared to risk popularity and positions to fight for the millions who have no work, no union and no future?If the answer is yes, then this giant can be born again. Not as a relic of the Industrial Revolution, but as a renewed movement of workers, citizens and communities who insist that even in an age of AI and algorithms, our common humanity must remain the starting point and the destination of history.

A giant is born - again: COSATU at 40 in the age of algorithms

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