For countries of Latin America or East and Central Europe, events since the 1980s have constituted a sharp break from the past. Words such as “transition,” “transformation,” “schism,” and “shock therapy” suggest ruptures of momentous proportions. Many of these countries have democratized their political systems and privatized their economies. Workers, consumers, and voters have taken to the streets in unprecedented numbers to demand jobs, fair elections, or fair trade. Prices have shot up, imports have exploded. Computers, cars, and advertisements proliferate. Formerly socialist states no longer guarantee housing. People buy it, or they live in cardboard boxes on the margins of rapidly growing cities.

In Africa, no less than in Latin America, Asia, or the former Soviet Union, profound political and economic changes have occurred also. The majority of states on the African continent now practice some form of democratic electoral politics and most have adopted neoliberal policies to varying degrees. States formerly as ideologically distinct as Uganda (capitalist) and Mozambique (socialist) have sold the bulk of their state sectors, wholly or partially, to foreign and domestic investors. Malls, fast-food restaurants, and cafes selling flavored coffees have sprouted up from Kampala to Cape Town. A dizzying array of consumer goods from cellular phones to microwaves are hawked on the streets of Maputo or displayed in upscale shops in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg. Stabilization, liberalization, privatization, globalization, globalism, consumerism, modernism, capitalism; the impact of all of these “izations” and “isms” is visible, unrelenting, and overwhelming.

As in the rest of the world, these “adjustments” have come with costs. Often praised by the international financial institutions for its exemplary implementation of neoliberal policies, Mozambique, for example, consistently ranks as one of the poorest countries in the world. In Zambia, formal sector employment as a percentage of the total available labor force has declined from 17 percent in 1992 to 10.4 percent in 1999. Just under half-a-million people currently have formal employment in Zambia, out of a total population of eleven million.Footnote ² Even in South Africa, which is the largest economy on the African continent, basic amenities such as water, sanitation, and sewage must now be bought by a population nearly half of whom are un- or underemployed.

These are alarming results, particularly considering that all three of these countries have had active and influential labor movements. Post-independence governments in two of the countries, Zambia and Mozambique, actively courted labor and supported the working class in a variety of ways. In South Africa, the participation of organized labor was critical to the movement against apartheid. Moreover, trade unions in all three countries have constituted the electoral base of ruling parties (and in two countries they continue to do so) and they have maintained strong associations with those parties. Yet, despite their histories and alliances, unions have little to show for their loyalty to parties in power. They have had little impact on the policy directions of their governments. Market reforms have steamed ahead, workplace security has deteriorated, and job losses have continued.

Why have labor movements in Mozambique, Zambia, and South Africa increasingly been marginalized from the economic debates that are taking place in their countries, even though they have provided political bases of support for parties in power? Although much of the literature on transition in Africa attributes this outcome to the adoption of specific policies such as privatization and trade liberalization, or the way that governments implemented them, scholars have paid less attention to the effects on labor of two paradoxical developments that have occurred alongside policy reform. The first concerns long-run, historical changes in the structural characteristics of the world economy, not only in processes of production and trade, but also in patterns of consumption. In industrialized countries, for example, Michael Storpor has highlighted growing income inequality arising from the introduction of labor saving technologies and the relocation of industry to areas in the South with lower labor costs, which has produced job loss and a decline in real wages, particularly for semiskilled workers. By contrast, he calls attention to the proliferation of consumer goods and the growth of “consumerist identities” as a result of the price reductions associated with technological changes and lower wages.Footnote ³

Storpor's analysis offers a useful framework for understanding what is taking place in developing countries. Across Africa, changes in production processes, the restructuring of distribution networks, and technological improvements coupled with the implementation of structural adjustment policies by governments have had different as well as contradictory effects. In Lesotho and Mauritius, sectors such as textiles and clothing have expanded as a consequence of the shift of production to the South; Mauritius is now the fifth-largest producer of shirts in the world.Footnote ⁴ In other countries such as Zambia, these changes have produced a decline in formal-sector employment, more cutthroat competition, the increasing mobility of labor and capital, and the growing casualization of labor. Whereas Zambia was formerly considered a middle-income developing country in the 1970s, it now qualifies along with Mozambique for Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) debt relief.

Yet ironically, while formal-sector employment has declined nearly everywhere in Africa, the availability of, and the demand for, consumer goods have never been greater. Due to the shift of production sites from the West to the South and technological innovation, the prices of goods have dropped, making everyday items from plastic plates to toys much cheaper. Moreover, billboard advertising and internet access have fostered demand at the top and disseminated knowledge of products to urban and rural areas of Africa. For example, items such as cellular phones offer a low-cost, more effective alternative to landlines and are also status symbols in some countries. Additionally, increases in the trade of secondhand clothing from the 1980s have allowed consumers to buy more and better clothing at lower prices.

A second paradox has to do with the institutional and ideological changes associated with the embrace of liberal democracy. While a number of studies have documented the influence of labor movements on the process of democratization, few have examined the impact of democratization on the power of organized labor, particularly in Africa.Footnote ⁵ Referring to this impact as the “pluralist paradox,” Lise Rakner demonstrates in the case of Zambia that although organized labor helped the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) to win Zambia's first democratic elections in 1991 (overturning in the process twenty-seven years of rule by Kenneth Kaunda), the power of the trade unions weakened as political and economic liberalization proceeded in the country. Not only did the government fail politically to incorporate the views of labor into its policy deliberations, but the growth of other groups, declines in trade-union membership, and splits within trade-union organization arising from the new pluralism diluted the voice of labor.Footnote ⁶ Beyond Zambia, Mozambique and South Africa exhibit similar patterns, illustrating the contradictory effects of dual political and economic transformations. Moreover, the labor movement's appropriation of discourses typically associated with democracy such as the right to civil and political liberties, the right to strike, or the right to a living wage have done little to shift the policy stances of these governments. As David Harvey points out, the substitution of a language of universal rights for the previous language of collective solidarity in emerging democracies has legitimated rather than subverted the new status quo produced by neoliberal institutional change.Footnote ⁷ Thus, the discursive and institutional terrain that labor confronts in emerging democracies offers daunting challenges.

Not surprisingly, the paradoxes embodied in the structural changes of the global economy and the rise of democratization not only have interacted with policy choices by African governments, but also they have conditioned the responses of organized labor across varied geographical spaces. The same processes that have produced an increase in consumer goods, a proliferation of entrepreneurs, the right to strike, and the right to vote, also have siphoned off labor protest into the ballot box; into casual, informal, or illegal work; or into alternative forms of civic association. Growing consumerism and an explosion of commodities have muted dissatisfaction by enchanting the young and the imaginative with illusory promises of choice regarding cars, homes, and lifestyles, when the actual conditions of employment suggest that these are not choices that the majority of Africans will ever be able to make.

To illustrate these processes, the article begins by examining the relationship in the 1980s between the state and labor within three countries of southern Africa: Zambia, Mozambique, and South Africa. The following section will discuss the kinds of economic reforms that governments undertook from the mid-1980s, how they were implemented, and what impact they had on organized labor. Using the textile and clothing sector as an example, the essay will then demonstrate the ways in which the reforms by states were a defensive response to the impact of global reorganization. A final section examines how these larger economic processes have interacted with political liberalization and the collective and contradictory responses by labor. To conclude, the article will trace the possibilities for labor to regain its strength in the near future.

Relations between Governments and Trade Unions Before Transition

Because African countries have been experiencing the effects of global economic restructuring, democratization, and neoliberal policies for nearly two decades, historical memories of the period immediately preceding these changes are now dim. To the extent that scholars mention the past at all, they usually denigrate it as a complete failure in the cases of Mozambique and Zambia; a failure of developmentalism, statism, and socialism. Or in the case of South Africa, they justifiably condemn the legacy of inequality and hardship left by a century of institutionalized racism. Alternatively, those who have criticized the adoption of structural adjustment policies and the conditionality imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) either implicitly or explicitly reconstruct the past in places such as Zambia or Mozambique as some utopian fantasy where land conflicts were less explosive, states were more capable or more inclusive, or working conditions were better.

Although this is no place for an extensive reckoning of what was and what was not occurring in the 1970s and 1980s, a few observations regarding the historical record bear directly on the predicament of labor today. In Mozambique, Zambia, and South Africa, states' relations with labor were highly differentiated depending on domestic political conditions and on the characteristics of particular economic sectors. At least two of the countries under discussion, Zambia and Mozambique, had developmentalist orientations that sought the expansion and improvement of wage-labor positions in the urban formal sector, and where the legitimacy of the party in power partially rested on the support of urban labor. In both countries, however, highly centralized, one party states largely dictated the contours of the relationship with labor through means that were both authoritarian and, at times, repressive. Ruling parties in both countries tightly controlled changes in the organization and activities of labor: decisionmaking tended to emanate from the top of the party\state hierarchy rather than emerging from the base.

In Mozambique, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frelimo) achieved independence in 1975, and formally adopted Marxism-Leninism in 1977. Almost immediately, the new government began to intervene in and nationalize many large and small factories in and around the cities and towns and to create state farms in the countryside, especially for export crops. Following state intervention or nationalization of approximately seventy-five percent of industrial production, much of Frelimo's early agenda consisted of organizing and politicizing labor in the formal sector by encouraging dynamizing groups in neighborhoods and places of work and setting up production councils or factory committees for workers in each factory.Footnote ⁸ By 1983, the government created the Organization of Mozambican Workers (OTM), an umbrella organization that brought together sixteen trade unions representing approximately 300,000 workers in sectors as diverse as food and beverages; textiles and clothing; steel, construction, banking, and railways. The percentage of workers in trade unions equaled about thirty-four percent of the total salaried labor force of nearly one million. Because the bulk of Mozambique's economically active population was (and continues to be) engaged in agricultural production for themselves or as family labor, the numbers of workers in trade unions constituted about five percent of the total workforce.Footnote ⁹

Yet this small, relatively privileged group constituted the base of the party and was the subject of much of the government's socialist rhetoric and policy pronouncements in the early years. Consistent with its commitment to socialism, the party/state bequeathed a number of favors on urban labor in return for its quiescent cooperation. Workers loyal to the party benefited, for example, from the distribution of homes and apartments following the state takeover of much of the rental housing in the “cidade de cimento” or the parts of cities and towns in which settlers had formerly lived, the “cement city.” For those who received the opportunity to live in these cement cities, the state-controlled rents were low.Footnote ¹⁰ The government expanded employment in state-run enterprises and raised salaries and wages. It provided free healthcare and education. It subsidized the purchase of consumer goods and transportation. Some state enterprises, notably ports and railways, offered on-site crèches for children, provided their own housing at reduced rents, fielded sports teams, and constructed social clubs for leisure activities. Even advertisements in weekly magazines, and especially national propaganda, praised the role of workers.Footnote ¹¹

Moreover, the ruling party paid attention to the small percentage of women engaged in wage labor. It supported the formation of the Organization of Mozambican Women to represent their concerns and it offered literacy classes, provided day care, authorized maternity leave, and passed other legislation intended to better the lives of women.Footnote ¹² Although the government failed to take into account some of the drawbacks of its efforts, (for example, literacy classes placed additional demands on women's time), it enjoyed the support of many male and female urban workers throughout the period formally associated with socialism. This was particularly the case in the southern capital of Maputo, where half of the country's industrial production was located.Footnote ¹³

In spite of its intention to better the lives of workers and the close relationship between the OTM and the party, the efforts of Frelimo to create a “workers” state unraveled. By the early 1980s, a growing war between the ruling party and a movement financed by the apartheid government in South Africa diverted resources and manpower to the conflict. Moreover, the war reinforced authoritarian tendencies within the ruling party which were reflected in campaigns to round up the idle and the indigent in the cities in order to make them work, or the launching of “offensives” designed to get workers to produce more. Furthermore, although cities and large towns remained heavily protected by the military, the conflict disrupted trade and industry. It interrupted the flow of agricultural products from the countryside on which many of the agro-processing industries such as cotton, cashew, and tea depended, or it disrupted imports that were critical to many industries such as textiles and clothing.Footnote ¹⁴

In addition to the impact of war on the countryside, Frelimo made mistakes with regard to the organization of agricultural production, which comprised a far greater number of economically active men and women than salaried labor. These errors contributed to shortages of raw materials such as cotton, sugar, and tea, which were responsible for about half of the supply of raw materials to industry.Footnote ¹⁵ By the late 1980s, many factories were producing below capacity or were at a standstill. The government often paid salaries late, if at all, and did not raise wages in line with inflation. In 1987, the passage of a structural adjustment package placed additional hardships on workers as prices shot up due to the withdrawal of subsidies. Nevertheless, when a peace agreement ended the war in 1992 and elections followed in 1994, most formal-sector, urban workers in the southern part of the country voted overwhelmingly for the Frelimo party.

Like the Mozambican government, the Zambian government under the leadership of Kenneth Kaunda, the first President after independence, attempted to cultivate a relationship with labor. However, the interaction between the government and the trade unions in Zambia was more fractious than that between Frelimo and the Mozambican urban labor force. Unlike the situation in Mozambique where the colonial state actively had suppressed attempts to organize black workers, the formation of trade unions in Zambia began during the colonial period. For example, the mineworkers' union, which was the largest union in the country, had formed in the 1940s to fight for better working conditions and wages on the copper mines. It developed independently of political parties, anticolonial movements, and the colonial government. Although the leadership and many members of the mineworkers' union identified with, and even supported anticolonial efforts, the union also vigorously maintained its autonomy and concentrated most of its energy on securing gains for its members in the workplace.

Following independence in 1964, the Kaunda government made strenuous efforts to co-opt labor using institutional and organizational means to do so. It had multiple and even conflicting motives for such actions. Its own ideological orientation, an eclectic blend of socialism and humanism, favored the interests of labor over that of capital. Moreover, the trade-union movement was well organized and offered a potential base of support for Kaunda's fledgling party, the United National Independence Party (UNIP). Alternatively, an autonomous trade union, particularly one as large as the mineworkers' union, constituted a potential threat to the objectives and the political power of the new government.Footnote ¹⁶

The Mineworkers' Union numbered 50,000 strong by independence. It represented some of the most highly skilled and best-paid workers in Zambia in an industry whose revenues would prove vital to the development of the country in the first decade of sovereignty. The union was thus well-placed to pressure the state for higher wages and benefits, and to challenge the state over policies with which it disagreed.Footnote ¹⁷ Disagreements sometimes led to open outbreaks of violence, such as the 1966 wildcat strike over wages,Footnote ¹⁸ but in the 1970s the state also granted concessions such as wage hikes to miners in return for electoral support.Footnote ¹⁹

Politically, economically, and ideologically, therefore, it was imperative that the government both harness and control the power of the trade-union movement but this proved more difficult than Frelimo's task in Mozambique owing to the history, size, and power of the unions in Zambia. In 1965, the government created an umbrella organization, the Zambia Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), to bring together all trade unions from the largest union, the Mine Workers' Union of Zambia, to the smallest union, the Zambia Typographical Union with 919 members.Footnote ²⁰ Out of a total population of 4 million, Zambia had around three quarters of a million salaried workers of which about fifty to sixty percent were unionized by the early 1980s.Footnote ²¹ Following its passage in 1971, the Industrial Relations Act required all existing unions to affiliate to ZCTU. In turn, ZCTU became affiliated to the ruling party, thus tying together the party and state institutions. Furthermore, the Industrial Relations Act introduced guidelines for collective bargaining and restrictions on the right to strike.

After declaring a one-party state in 1973, the government gave ZCTU the power to take part in negotiations over wages and working conditions between employers and trade unions, a step that one writer characterized as a means by which the state sought to “neutralize working-class demands.”Footnote ²² Nationalization of seventy to eighty percent of economic production during the 1970s tightened the institutional link between the state and labor. With the creation of parastatals in nearly every economic sector, about forty percent of the formal sector labor force worked for the state.Footnote ²³

As long as copper prices remained high, relations between the government and the trade unions in Zambia swayed between cooperation and cooptation. When prices dropped in the mid-1970s, unions became more militant and the government, more recalcitrant. Between 1974 and 1977, copper prices declined by twenty-five percent, thus decreasing also the government's revenue from taxes on minerals. To deal with the accompanying economic crisis, the government restricted imports, froze salaries, and reduced subsidies on the recommendation of the World Bank and the IMF. Most of these measures undercut the position of urban labor which had already seen real wages decline by about fifty percent from the mid-1960s. As their position deteriorated, unions under the leadership of Frederick Chiluba, the head of ZCTU, began openly to protest the government, winning concessions in some instances and inviting a repressive response from the state in others. By the mid-1980s, the ruling party had restricted the right to strike and prohibited those unions that broke the law from collecting dues through automatic payroll deductions. Further, the government no longer allowed labor leaders to speak at May Day rallies.Footnote ²⁴

Although the Kaunda government attempted to weaken labor organizationally and symbolically throughout the 1980s, its efforts proved unsuccessful. Frederick Chiluba brought organized workers into a heterogeneous coalition of labor, business, and academia to demand the end of the one-party state. Elected President of the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) at its first National Convention in March 1991, Frederick Chiluba then became President of Zambia following the country's first multiparty elections in November, 1991. Having served as one of the main pillars of support for the new party, the Zambian labor movement looked forward to a promising future.

The situation in South Africa was starkly different. During the period when the Mozambican and Zambian governments were developing relationships with organized labor, South Africa was still an apartheid state where the workplace was highly segregated. Not only did black workers not have the right to vote, but also they did not have the right to strike for much of the twentieth century. Yet, by 1981, the energetic efforts of workers and their leaders forced the government to extend trade-union rights to black workers. Not only did such recognition greatly enhance the power of labor, but also it spurred a massive growth in trade-union membership. By 1994, the year that South Africa held democratic elections, the number of trade union members equaled 3.2 million wage workers or about forty percent of salaried workers, a slightly lower rate of unionization than in Zambia but an extremely high rate in comparison with other countries in Africa.Footnote ²⁵ Members were overwhelmingly black, and about one-third were women.

Although black workers were included in collective bargaining agreements and trade unions realized some gains for their members, segregation and systematic institutional discrimination persisted throughout the 1980s. Moreover, black workers in the “Bantustans” designated by the apartheid government were denied trade-union rights. The continuing injustices inculcated in trade-union members the conviction that the struggle for justice could not be confined to the workplace, but must be extended to national politics. These convictions encouraged trade unions to form associations with existing antiapartheid movements to realize national, democratic, political change. By the mid-1980s, the trade-union movement joined the broader antiapartheid struggle through one of two federations, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), formed in 1985 and the National Council of Trade Unions (NACTU), a much smaller, weaker grouping formed in 1986. Other trade unions remained independent or, by restricting their membership to whites only, they reproduced the institutional discrimination practiced by the apartheid state.Footnote ²⁶

Complex linkages with the antiapartheid struggle brought gains and drawbacks to organized labor. On the one hand, trade unions contributed numerical strength and organizational ability to the movement in exchange for influence over its goals and ideology. On the other hand, trade unions, even within federations such as COSATU, differed among themselves regarding which strategies to adopt, what relationships to build, and where their political beliefs lay. Of great concern once the government legalized antiapartheid organizations such as the African National Congress (ANC) in the 1990s was that the more general goals of the political organizations would overshadow the interests of labor regarding wages or working conditions. In addition, COSATU members resented the centralizing, statist approaches of the ANC-South African Communist Party (SACP) alliance.Footnote ²⁷

Events overshadowed whatever differences over goals and tactics that trade unions may have had with political groups. Popular rebellion led to the declaration of a state of emergency from 1984 to 1986. Nineteen million labor days were lost due to work stoppages arising from strike action over a wide range of issues during the decade between 1980 and 1990. Beyond more activist forms of resistance such as strikes, stayaways, and boycotts, unions also worked to transform the collective bargaining system at the national and sectoral levels and to negotiate with businesses on economic issues.Footnote ²⁸ By early 1990, COSATU had cemented a tripartite alliance with the ANC and SACP and had begun drafting a program of reconstruction which it hoped would be the basis of the ANC's economic policy if it got into power.Footnote ²⁹ As a key player in the struggle against apartheid, then, the trade-union movement appeared centrally placed to benefit from a change of regime.

Economic Policy Reforms and Democratic Transition

Despite their very different historical circumstances, organized labor in Mozambique, Zambia, and South Africa should have been well positioned to influence favorably the governments that took office following transitions to democracy. In all three cases, it comprised a key constituency of the parties that came to power. In Mozambique, organized labor, heavily concentrated around the southern capital of Maputo, had remained loyal to the Frelimo party during the period of conflict and continued to give its strong support to the party in the 1994 elections that Frelimo won. In Zambia, organized labor constituted one of the foundations of the MMD. With Frederick Chiluba, a former trade unionist, as President, organized labor should have had direct influence on the policymaking process in Zambia after 1991. In South Africa, the association between labor and the new ruling party, the ANC, appeared even stronger. Black workers had demonstrated overwhelming support for the ANC at the polls. COSATU was a key component of the tripartite alliance along with the ANC and the SACP; it had representatives in government, and helped to draft the Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP) which expressed the government's policy agenda following the 1994 elections. Moreover, it belonged to a highly participatory bargaining council, the National Economic Development and Labour Council (NEDLAC) along with government, business representatives, and community organizations.

Yet in all three countries, the power of labor weakened markedly by 2005 and its ability to influence governmental policies waned. Total numbers of trade unionists declined as unemployment increased during the 1990s. In Mozambique, out of a total available labor force of 9 million, only half-a-million of those worked in the formal sector, indicating that about half-a-million jobs were lost or reclassified since the early 1980s. Of those employed in the formal sector, about 200,000 belonged to one of seventeen trade unions in the country.Footnote ³⁰ In Zambia, while rates of unionization remained high in comparison with the average in Africa, overall union membership declined to about 250,000 members by 2000, consistent with the decline in formal-sector employment from about 750,000 workers in the 1970s to 478,000 workers by 2000.Footnote ³¹ In the important copper sector, trade-union membership dropped precipitously from 62,000 in 1990 to 25,000 in 1999 owing to mine closures and job losses.Footnote ³²

In South Africa, the government abandoned the RDP just two years after it was passed in favor of a neoliberal policy agenda. Organized labor in South Africa also faced a number of obstacles. Out of an economically active population of nearly 21 million, just under a third had full-time work, and around forty percent of that number belonged to trade unions.Footnote ³³ In addition to high unemployment rates which affected union membership, unions in South Africa have continued to battle authoritarian practices at the workplace. Moreover, changes to regulations, labor legislation, and the nature of work have harmed rather than benefited labor.

Much of the scholarly literature has highlighted the adoption of structural adjustment policies by African governments as the cause of the worsening economic conditions for workers and the hardships they have faced over the last ten to fifteen years. Structural adjustment policies consist of a complex array of policy initiatives, from restrictions on the money supply through cutbacks in state spending, to reform of the public sector through privatization or commercialization, to the promotion of good governance. Some scholars have criticized the content of these policies, arguing that their implementation exacerbated existing inequalities, favored the rich over the poor, and placed productive capital in the hands of foreigners.Footnote ³⁴ Others have blamed the way that they were implemented for the negative effects they have had on various social groups. They claim that governments have mishandled or only partially implemented key features of structural adjustment and that they have favored cronies of the state over serious investors.Footnote ³⁵ Evidence from our three countries presented below suggests that both the content of these policies and the way that governments have implemented them have had an impact on labor, but that a focus on policy reform alone offers an incomplete explanation of labor's current malaise. Forthcoming sections address this latter issue.

Several aspects of structural adjustment such as trade liberalization, privatization, and changes to labor legislation have directly affected formal-sector jobs, workplace conditions, and the cost of living in Zambia, Mozambique, and South Africa. While all three countries made halfhearted attempts to liberalize trade in the late 1980s, governments became much more committed to trade and tariff liberalization and privatization following democratic elections in 1991 in Zambia and 1994 in South Africa and Mozambique. Trade liberalization has proceeded in several directions. Governments have joined global trade organizations, signed trade agreements, established and improved revenue authorities to improve the collection of duties at the borders, and reduced tariffs on imports or subsidies on exports. As a condition of the loans and advice that they received from the IMF and the World Bank, both Zambia and Mozambique were persuaded to join multilateral and bilateral trade organizations. Although not a recipient of loans from either of these international financial institutions, South Africa also adhered to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and then the World Trade Organization (WTO). In addition, all three countries have participated in multilateral trading arrangements organized by the European Union and they qualify for the selective incentives offered by the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) promoted by the United States.

Similarly, all three countries are participants in a regional trade organization, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) which includes thirteen countries in southern Africa. Zambia is additionally a member of the Common Market of Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA). To further boost trade and attract investors, all of these countries have created industrial free zones and export development zones where investors and traders take advantage of trade and tariff incentives. Consistent with their adherence to the WTO and other trade agreements, they have reduced tariffs and other restrictions on imports. Mozambique's trade weighted import tariff is one of the lowest in Africa at nine percent. The South African government also withdrew schemes designed to subsidize exporters following its adherence to GATT.Footnote ³⁶

Along with the liberalization of trade, governments have vigorously pursued privatization and restructuring policies. By 2000, the Mozambican government had sold 1200 firms to the private sector in what was termed the “most successful privatization program in Africa” by the World Bank. While the government sold the majority of firms to domestic investors, many of whom had direct connections to state officials, foreign investors accounted for the majority of the value of investment. In addition to purchasing existing firms in telecommunications, hotels, the ports sector, cement, and plastics, investors from Portugal, South Africa, and the United Kingdom also invested in new projects such as an aluminum plant, one of the largest investments in Africa; an iron and steel plant; and various tourist complexes. Total projected investment in existing or new projects equaled about eight billion US dollars by 2002.Footnote ³⁷

Like Mozambique, a majority of the economy was in state hands by the time Zambia committed to privatization in the early 1990s. About ninety percent of state owned enterprises were losing money at the time of privatization. Out of a total portfolio of 282 companies, Zambia privatized around 261 companies as of 2005.Footnote ³⁸ These sales included businesses in almost every sector from manufacturing to tourism. Although around sixty percent of the companies were sold to Zambians, purchases by foreigners accounted for the bulk of the revenue of nearly one billion US dollars received from sales. Foreigners were responsible for the majority of the investment in the country too.Footnote ³⁹ In addition, the government sold thousands of council houses and hundreds of small shops to Zambians. Amid numerous administrative delays and charges of corruption, it also completed the privatization of the country's greatest asset, the copper mines, in 2000. After breaking the parastatal into ten separate packages, the government sold the mines at rock-bottom prices to a number of foreign investors from Canada, South Africa, Great Britain, the USA, and Australia, among others.Footnote ⁴⁰

Privatization has generated nearly US$2.4 billion in revenue for the South African government from the full or partial sale of approximately twenty-five firms, but because the parastatal sector in the country is relatively small in relation to the size of the economy, the sale of state assets has not been as central to South Africa's economic policy agenda as in Mozambique and Zambia. The South African government also has been more reluctant than governments in either Mozambique or Zambia to part with major assets such as its ports, railways, aerospace industry, electricity, telecommunications, and broadcasting.Footnote ⁴¹ Where South Africa has experienced significant change, however, has been in the inclusion of the private sector in service delivery at the local level. In 1998, the South African government created a not-for-profit company called the Municipal Infrastructure Investment Unit to give technical and financial help to municipal authorities seeking to form partnerships with the private sector to provide municipal services such as water, garbage collection, sanitation, and public transport.Footnote ⁴² The creation of Municipal Service Partnerships (MSPs) reflected a change in the priorities of the national government from the goals embodied in the RDP in 1994 to those expressed in the Growth, Employment, and Redistribution Plan (GEAR) launched only two years later in 1996.Footnote ⁴³ These priorities showed a clear preference for economic policies that emphasized cost recovery and included the private sector. They resulted in the introduction of user fees, the installation of meters for water and electricity usage, and other costcutting measures for basic service delivery.

Trade liberalization and privatization have obviously had a major impact on these countries over the last fifteen years. Beyond allowing increased foreign participation on a scale unprecedented since the colonial period, governments have also used privatization to build new, loyal constituencies who benefit from their policies, to reward political supporters, or to foster the growth of indigenous capital as illustrated by South Africa's policy of “black economic empowerment.” In addition, more open trade and privatization have introduced cutthroat competition into formal and informal trade of consumer goods from cellular phones to secondhand clothes. The expansion of existing sectors and the development of nontraditional sectors such as aluminum processing in Mozambique, for example, have created some jobs and consumers appreciate lower prices. But private companies that cannot withstand the competition from imports, or whose owners strip assets rather than investing in productive assets, have collapsed, prompting job losses in the formal sector.

Governments have also sought to facilitate private sector growth and greater global integration by reforming labor legislation. Many private companies can now take advantage of legal exemptions to employ casual labor, contract out work, avoid collective bargaining, and sidestep existing social protections for labor. Private companies in Mozambique, for example, use a legal loophole to classify workers as casual labor so they can avoid protections afforded to workers by the 1998 Labor Law.Footnote ⁴⁴ In Zambia, there is no law mandating a minimum wage, prohibitions still exist on the right to strike, and few workers receive redundancy packages when companies restructure.Footnote ⁴⁵ In South Africa, progressive labor legislation followed in the wake of the ANC's democratic victory in 1994 but some of this has been revisited, revised, or ignored in recent years.Footnote ⁴⁶ Employers may also apply to the Ministry of Labor for exemptions from bargaining council agreements and studies indicate that the Ministry approves about three quarters of these.Footnote ⁴⁷

Despite the reforms, macroeconomic growth in both South Africa and Zambia was sluggish until recently, whereas growth rates have averaged around ten percent per year in Mozambique since the mid-1990s, owing to Mozambique's status as a post-conflict country. Nevertheless, working conditions worsened; the casualization, externalization, and informalization of labor expanded; the cost of living went up; and formal-sector employment declined in all three countries.

Given the negative effects of reforms on the interests of labor, why did labor have so little influence on government policy? In the Latin-American context, Raúl Madrid has argued persuasively that because trade liberalization and privatization selectively impact some unions more than others, collective action against these reforms tends to be more difficult to organize than action against reforms that impose widespread losses on union members.Footnote ⁴⁸ The responses of labor to reforms in southern Africa partially illustrate his claims. In Mozambique and Zambia, organized labor offered little resistance to the implementation of privatization and liberalization. Indeed, unions in both countries accepted the inevitability of privatization given the severe crises that their state sectors were experiencing. A dearth of consumer goods in the late 1980s also silenced much of the opposition to trade liberalization. Moreover, while selected unions in both countries have vigorously protested the effects of these two reforms through numerous strikes and demonstrations, collective resistance has rarely emerged due to the differential impact of the reforms across sectors.

In South Africa, on the other hand, the trade-union response to cost recovery schemes and changes to labor laws has been widespread and negative because these reforms have impacted union members collectively.Footnote ⁴⁹ Regardless of the strength of the reaction, however, governments in all three countries have made few concessions to the opposition and have continued with the reforms. Labor's inability to shift governmental priorities is not only a consequence of the reforms themselves, but also it suggests that additional factors influence state/labor relations.

The Paradox of Global Restructuring

Along with domestic policies, long-term historic shifts in the structure of global competition and democratization have affected organized labor adversely. Regarding global restructuring, dramatic changes in the organization of production, in retail and wholesale trade, and in the culture of consumption have taken place over the last twenty years. The adoption of structural adjustment policies by southern African countries was thus not simply an effort to engineer from above what had occurred elsewhere in the world. Rather, it was a defensive response and an imperfect solution to the impact of global changes on particular sectors, on work habits, and on consumer choices by ordinary Africans.

Production processes have become both more flexible and more specialized: the production of one good can span several continents. The entry into the global commodity trade of significant quantities of lower-cost goods by Asian, Eastern and Central European, and Latin-American countries has altered patterns of competition and fueled capital accumulation in new regions of the globe.Footnote ⁵⁰ In turn, ordinary Africans have responded to the dramatic reorganization of production and trade by becoming casual workers in existing factories; subcontracted employees who do piece-work from their homes; informal traders in parallel markets; or transporters and distributors of stolen goods. In doing so, they have blurred the line between formal and informal work, which has complicated the bargaining position of trade unions.

At the same time, these changes have expanded the availability of consumer items in the most congested cities in the developing world and in the most remote rural locations. Alongside the global reorganization of production and trade, the spread of the internet has facilitated the growth of international advertising and brand-name marketing so that sizeable swathes of population from Sao Paolo to Johannesburg now know about, and want, the latest cellular phone technology, Nike shoes, or Hummers. Consumer identities have been born in some places and have become entrenched in others. The growth of these identities also influences trade-union responses and strategies.

Although the impact of these structural changes on Africa is too extensive to document here, a brief examination of the textile sector helps to identify its implications for organized labor in the countries that are the subject of this study. Much earlier and to a greater extent than any other manufacturing sector, textiles and clothing over the past forty years have undergone sweeping technological and organizational modifications, which have led to increases in production and trade. The consolidation of buyer-driven value chains dominated by major international retailers has generated an increasingly aggressive search for low prices and quick turnaround times. This has shifted the production and location of textiles and clothing manufacture to low-cost countries; introduced more flexible production strategies such as home-based work; reconfigured employment contracts and subcontracting arrangements; improved technology; and dramatically reorganized distribution networks for the sale of clothing. Integral to those changes have been the alterations to the rules and regulations governing labor as well as international trade, including the formation of the WTO, regional trade agreements, and the growth of export development zones.

From a value of US$3 billion in 1965, world apparel exports increased to US$119 billion in 1991. Paralleling these increases, developing countries' share of those exports increased from fourteen percent to nearly fifty-nine percent over the same time period. By 2000, Asian and Latin American countries, for example, accounted for about thirty percent each of the total imports of apparel by the United States, which is the largest importer of apparel from developing countries.Footnote ⁵¹

With the shift of production to lower-cost countries, it would seem that African countries would benefit. In Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), after the food and beverage sector, the textile sector is the second largest sector in manufacturing with regard to value added.Footnote ⁵² It is also a major employer of labor. While textile production in SSA has increased over the last twenty years, it is puzzling why it has not grown more given the adoption of free-trade policies by European Union member countries and beneficial multi- and bilateral trade agreements between developed and developing countries on the African continent. Although the restructuring of economies in East and Central Europe since the early 1990s accounts for part of the reason why African countries have not benefited, many SSA countries, with the exception of Mauritius and Lesotho, also faced several domestic and global barriers to restructuring and expansion over the years. Thus, as of 2001, textiles and clothing only accounted for about six percent of Africa's export trade; Africa's manufactures only made up about one percent of the global export trade.Footnote ⁵³ On the other hand, Africa accounted for twenty-five percent of global demand for secondhand clothes, the highest in the world.Footnote ⁵⁴

Contrary to the claim that governments in Africa never seriously promoted import substitution industrialization policies,Footnote ⁵⁵ the textile and clothing sector expanded substantially in Mozambique, Zambia, and South Africa following the Second World War. While in no country did it become a dominant sector, the development of textile and garment factories allowed all three of them to substitute partially or wholly for imports from the 1950s until the 1970s. By the 1980s, however, the war in Mozambique nearly brought production to a halt despite attempts by the government to expand the state-controlled sector just after independence. In Zambia, too, import restrictions and foreign exchange controls stifled the ability of parastatals as well as private operators in the domestic sector to respond qualitatively and quantitatively to the tastes, needs, and budgets of Zambian consumers or to produce for export. Furthermore, due to the fall of copper prices and the subsequent deterioration of the macroeconomic situation, the Zambian government was unable to finance continued investment in the sector. Factories produced below capacity or shut all together.Footnote ⁵⁶

Due to international sanctions on trade, private textile firms in South Africa supplied over ninety percent of the domestic market during the 1980s.Footnote ⁵⁷ However, sanctions ultimately contributed to the sector's decline as did a number of other factors. State favoritism of the mining-industrial complex; apartheid policies that prevented the location of mills to areas of available, low cost labor; and protectionism discouraged investment in the industry.Footnote ⁵⁸ From 1972 to 1983, the share of the textile sector in manufacturing capital stock decreased by fifty percent due to low levels of investment.Footnote ⁵⁹ Across the South African economy, net investment was near zero by 1990.Footnote ⁶⁰ As machinery aged and investment dropped, plants failed to produce to capacity and job losses began to occur. In addition, the industry was unable to keep pace with changes in quality and design that were occurring in other countries. As in Zambia, domestic consumer demand for locally produced textiles stagnated by the 1980s in South Africa.

In response to deterioration at home and improvements in production abroad, workers and consumers in Zambia and Mozambique began to trade in secondhand clothes or to produce garments informally by the 1980s despite official import barriers. In Mozambique, some of the secondhand clothes were donated by developed countries as part of relief efforts during the war or during natural disasters (hence they were known as calamidades). Traders hawked them in city streets and markets or in remote rural markets. Moreover, paralleling the shift that was occurring in other parts of the globe, small, informal, home-based industries sprouted up in towns and cities using cloth that some suspected was illegally imported.Footnote ⁶¹ In Zambia, the secondhand trade (known as salaula) began to expand in the mid-1980s. It involved not only wholesalers in the formal sector but also informal retail traders, including women. Formal retailers sold secondhand goods out of established shops in Kamwala township in Lusaka or young people received a commission to hawk clothes on the street.Footnote ⁶² Consumers were already savvy about design and quality and were attracted to the low prices.

Thus, by the time that both countries had firmly committed to trade liberalization strategies and privatization in the 1990s, trade in secondhand clothes had become entrenched. No wonder then that many workers in both countries initially did not challenge privatization and liberalization. Not only were they loyal to the parties in power, but many had already lost formal-sector jobs due to plant closures and were buying or selling goods in informal markets.

Yet the privatization of parastatals in Zambia and in Mozambique has not yielded improvements. In Mozambique, the contribution of textiles and clothing to industrial production is negligible.Footnote ⁶³ Only two out of the seven textile factories that still existed after the war are working, while only four garment factories remain in operation. Although the production of raw cotton has rebounded, there appear to be few upward and downward linkages between cotton producers and textile manufacturers. Instead, to meet exacting global design standards, those factories in the garment industry that produce for export rely heavily on imports which drives up the cost. Additionally, the textile sector has hardly benefited from the many trade protocols that the Mozambican government has signed.Footnote ⁶⁴

In Zambia, many factories have also closed in the last twenty years. The total number of registered textile and clothing factories plummeted from 140 to just over 50. From a total of 25,000 workers, the industry now employs about 10,000 formal sector workers.Footnote ⁶⁵ Only a fraction of the privatized or restructured textile and clothing producers that now remain can compete abroad. While exports have been growing they have not outpaced textile and clothing imports. Zambian firms mostly supply spun yarn to the EU; they have not benefited from increased exports to the US under the terms of AGOA.Footnote ⁶⁶

Unlike Mozambique and Zambia, where the growth of informal trade provoked defensive policy responses followed by inadequate, belated efforts to reorganize the textile sector; in South Africa, the sequence was different. The liberalization of trade policy occurred first and its deleterious consequences on the domestic market then drove industrial reorganization. As such, it mimicked a pattern observed by Peter Winn in Chile's textile sector following the adoption of neoliberal trade policies by the regime of Augusto Pinochet.Footnote ⁶⁷

From the mid-1980s, the apartheid government began to liberalize trade in the hope of securing export markets for textiles. During the period of sanctions this had little impact on exports but on the import side, it exposed South Africa to more competitive products from abroad. As tariffs dropped, the sector was unprepared for the highly competitive conditions of the global market and could not compete with regard to cost, quality, or design. In clothing, the result was that imports supplied forty percent of the domestic market by 1989. Exposure to imports accelerated in the 1990s as the ANC-led government continued to reduce import tariffs. Like Zambia and Mozambique, South Africa witnessed increases in used clothing imports. At the same time, the value of new clothing imports nearly quadrupled between 1991 and 2000. Asian countries were the major suppliers but imports of both new and used clothing were also coming from neighboring countries including Mozambique and Zambia. Additionally, there were reports of illegal dumping of textiles.Footnote ⁶⁸

To cope with the global restructuring of textiles and the decrease in domestic demand, South African manufacturers in the sector began to change production strategies. These included niche marketing, more flexible production processes, just in time technology, and subcontracting to clusters of smaller firms or home based work both inside and outside of the country. With the end of apartheid, investment and upgrading of the capital stock also increased although not enough to keep pace with foreign competitors. Despite the fact that the South African Clothing and Textile Workers' Union was an early participant alongside government and business in several policymaking initiatives for the sector in the early 1990s, the union was unable to staunch the detrimental effects of restructuring on labor.Footnote ⁶⁹ Estimates suggest that formal employment in textiles and clothing dropped from nearly 228,000 in 1996 to 142,000 in 2005.Footnote ⁷⁰ Statistics on the growing use of informal labor are unreliable but estimates are that just in Mitchell's Plain, a suburb of Cape Town, a total of 5,000 to 15,000 informal workers run home-based operations.Footnote ⁷¹

For manufacturers, these tactics have not yet yielded benefits as imports of both textiles and clothing have continued to rise. To offset the challenges in the domestic market, manufacturers have tried to increase exports to the EU, to other African countries, and to the United States under the terms of AGOA. Exports to the US rose from US$60 million to $205 million between 1995 and 2003 and total exports of textiles and clothing have posted increases. However, due to the strength of the rand and the ending of the Multi-Fiber Agreement, exports to the US dropped by half between 2003 and 2005.Footnote ⁷²

Over the last two decades, changes in the textile and clothing sectors in Mozambique, Zambia, and South Africa have been driven as much by global restructuring of production and distribution networks, technological innovation and consumer preferences as by domestic policies. All three countries have lost formal-sector jobs as factories have closed and/or changed their technology. All three have witnessed a reduction in benefits for existing labor and an increasing casualization of the workforce. As much of the formal and informal labor is female, this has placed additional hardships on women. For trade unions in these countries, these developments not only have differential effects across sectors and issues as Madrid has argued for Latin America, but also they have reduced union membership and transformed the issues around which union labor has historically organized. Democratization should have provided an effective counterweight to these developments; the next section examines why it did not.

The Irony of Democracy

In Zambia and South Africa, organized labor helped to bring about the transition to democracy and in all three countries, the support of labor proved decisive in the victories of the MMD, Frelimo, and the ANC. Moreover, it is undeniable that partisan loyalty by labor provided democratic governments with the legitimacy and security they needed in order to implement market-based reforms, a phenomenon that has been observed in other countries.Footnote ⁷³ Though there is no way of knowing with certainty, it is unlikely that non-labor-based parties in these countries could have implemented such reforms as completely as they did.

Just as organized labor has helped to bring about democracy and provided a basis of support for policies enacted by ruling parties, democratic politics also has increased opportunities for labor. Regular elections, a proliferation of interest groups, the right to organize, and the expansion of the media have given trade unions chances to express their grievances regarding job losses and working conditions, and to rebuke governments over particular policy choices. Democracy has offered incentives for labor to adopt new strategies with regard to political parties or other groups in civil society, and provided outlets for labor to get its message across to the political leadership and the general public.Footnote ⁷⁴

Moreover, in tandem with moves towards greater global integration, trade unions are forging alliances with transnational organizations, domestic church groups, and community based associations. In Mozambique, for example, OTM has helped to launch an association that organizes informal workers (mostly women) at twenty-six local markets in the capital. In Zambia, too the head of the Zambia Congress of Trade Unions has recognized the importance of working with informal-economy workers who now have their own organization, the Zambia Informal Economy Association formed in 2001. In turn, these two organizations are affiliated to a transnational organization that seeks to organize and represent the needs of street vendors.Footnote ⁷⁵

Although there are serious differences regarding goals and tactics within trade unions, and between trade unions and other organizations, the trade-union movement can bring its organizational experience to these new forms of civic participation.Footnote ⁷⁶ Union members can also provide tactical skills, from organizing resistance to developing job training schemes. Of the three countries, trade unions in South Africa probably have the best chance of realizing gains from these approaches in the future. They are not only numerically larger than movements in the other two countries, but also they are in an institutionally stronger position to pressure the ruling party. They have greater organizational and financial capabilities, and better links with other civic groups.

Despite new patterns of interaction between unions, governments, and other social groups, however, organized labor has confronted serious challenges occasioned by the transition to democratic politics that have undermined its strength. The causes of this “pluralist paradox” as Lise Rakner has described it are not only intimately intertwined with the structural economic changes and policy reforms described above, but also they stem from particular ideological and institutional characteristics associated with the kind of “?‘lean’ social democracy” that has consolidated across much of southern Africa.Footnote ⁷⁷ Regarding the ideological shifts that have occurred, socialist discourse, which influenced so many labor movements after the Second World War, and the prospects for a socialist alternative are now dead. In Mozambique, efforts by the ports and railways trade union in the late 1990s to frame its denunciation of massive retrenchments, growing inequality, and the lack of benefits for remaining workers in the language of socialism made little impression on the Frelimo government, which now fully embraces the rhetoric and the practices of neoliberalism.Footnote ⁷⁸ In Zambia, Kaunda's philosophy of humanism is in the dustbin, replaced by billboards advertising cars or soap, and sensationalist newspaper articles castigating gay lifestyles. In South Africa, the ANC has quietly dropped the more socialist aspects of the Freedom Charter, the document which embodied many of the movement's early principles.

Instead, the language of individual rights—the right to association, the right to free speech, the right to vote, the right to own private property, and the right to consume—has now replaced the language of collective action, workers' solidarity, and communal rights. Citizens from societies that formerly dismissed or circumscribed the rights of individuals, no doubt greatly appreciate such language. Yet, as one Mozambican worker observed regarding the gains and losses brought by the transition to democracy and the market economy:

As the letter writer to the Mozambican newspaper recognized and David Harvey has observed, the discourse of individual rights does not fully address the inequities wrought by the concomitant spread of capitalism. First, human rights tend to take a backseat to the right to private property and profit: the result is that a language of individual rights legitimates rather than unsettles the status quo.Footnote ⁸⁰ Second, those rights that are essential to the well being of those who live in Mozambique, Zambia, and South Africa remain to be fully realized. Governments have laws protecting labor and rights enshrined in their Constitutions but do not enforce them consistently. Dispute settlement tribunals function imperfectly, if at all. Finally, the language of rights competes with, and sometimes is subsumed by, the discourse of consumption and consumerism. While the outrage of consumers has driven the resistance against user fees in South Africa, rising consumerism may act as a social palliative, influencing citizens to care more about cars than collective action.

The institutional arrangements that characterize democratic politics in Africa also have weakened labor. First, while labor has been able to take advantage of its association with ruling parties to influence the content of labor laws or to negotiate redundancy packages in selected instances, trade unions are losing influence with political parties. This is not just a question of “autonomy” versus “dependence.” It also has to do with resources and with the poor state of the party system in Africa. In South Africa, opposition parties have little chance of getting elected and at any rate have never shown much sympathy for labor so trade unions must bargain with the ANC. Moreover, notwithstanding COSATU's enthusiastic support for the candidacy of Jacob Zuma as the next leader of the ANC, it is unlikely that Zuma can reverse the assault on labor of external competition and the changing global environment.Footnote ⁸¹ In Mozambique, trade unions have no other alternative but to bargain with the ruling party, because the opposition party, Renamo, has historically been hostile to organized labor. It thus remains loyal to Frelimo.

The situation is different but equally difficult in Zambia. After initially working hand in glove with the MMD, support for the party in the Copper Belt has fallen precipitously since 1996 owing to the poor treatment of mine workers. In spite of strong labor support for the Patriotic Front during the 2006 elections, however, the likelihood that opposition parties will embrace labor issues is limited. Political parties in Zambia are chronically underfunded; they splinter easily; and they tend to be dominated by personalities, not political platforms.

Second, democratization has unleashed many more voices that clamor for the attention of government. Trade unions with declining memberships jostle for government attention with nongovernmental organizations from fundamentalist churches to women's microenterprise associations. They also confront the louder, growing, better-financed voice of business. Such a plurality of demands muffles the voice of labor. In Zambia, the multiplicity of active civil society associations has led Rakner to observe that “paradoxically, Zambian interest groups had some real influence under the former one-party structures and [that] this influence has been reduced as a result of the combined processes of political and economic liberalization.”Footnote ⁸² With regard to South Africa, the irony is that trade unions are not simply adjusting to politics after apartheid, but politics after antiapartheid. Whereas COSATU played a dominant role in the transition and still forms part of the Alliance, it now competes with community-based organizations, HIV/AIDS groups, and new social movements for members, resources, and influence.Footnote ⁸³

Third, with regard to the workplace, the process of democratization has involved both institutional change and continuity-each of which has affected trade union solidarity. On the one hand, consistent with their commitment to freedom of organization, most governments have allowed the formation of independent unions and changed the terms of collective bargaining. Employees have a greater range of choices with regard to union affiliation. Moreover, trade unions now have the “freedom” to negotiate their rights with hundreds of private-sector actors, not the state, on a firm-by-firm or sector-by-sector basis. On the other hand, the growth of independent unions has fragmented the power of existing labor unions. Unions divide over which tactics to adopt in a particular situation. Management and the state also can play competing unions off against each other. Firm-level negotiations regarding the terms of employment, moreover, have produced variations in wage and salary levels, benefits, bonuses, and holidays, and destabilize the bargaining power of union members.Footnote ⁸⁴

In addition, authoritarian practices have returned or remained. Union members in Zambia face possible arrest or dismissal if they go on strike while employers resort to contract labor or threaten redundancy to avoid the use of unionized labor. In Mozambique, police have intimidated and harassed workers during demonstrations. Workers also have reported that new foreign owners are racist and antiunion.Footnote ⁸⁵ Such developments prompted one study to conclude that both change and continuity at the workplace have resulted in mostly “low-road” practices characterized by casualization, a lack of skilled workers, the informalization of working conditions, and union-busting by employers.Footnote ⁸⁶ Lastly, in South Africa, incidents of racial conflict on the job mean that workers not only confront new challenges, but they too must continue to battle against old forms of exploitation. As Karl Von Holdt has claimed, “stalemate and fluidity” exemplify the workplace.Footnote ⁸⁷ Apparently, they describe the national political space, too.