We celebrate May Day and Freedom Day but SA's working class is still unfree

Mail & Guardian

30-04-2025

About 32% of the population is unemployed; of the employed, 35.9% are in informal work; and of the formally employed, nearly 40% earn less than R3,500 a month.
Each year, the end of April carries the weight of two pivotal commemorations: May Day and Freedom Day. One marks the global assertion of workers' rights. The other celebrates the defeat of apartheid and the promise of democracy in South Africa. But in 2025, the distance between these two ideals is painfully wide.
As capital deepens its grip and the state retreats from its social obligations, the working class, once the backbone of the anti-apartheid movement, is being pushed back into the shadows.
South Africa's labour movement has never been just about wages. From its early days, it was rooted in the understanding that capitalism, especially in its racialised form, could never deliver liberation for the majority. The Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU), active in the 1920s and 1930s, stretched beyond the factory floor by organising workers, rural farmworkers and shackdwellers challenging the colour bar.
Later, the Federation of South African Trade Unions (Fosatu) in the 1970s and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) in the 1980s built not just unions but democratic, worker-led organisations. They understood, as Lenin argued, that 'the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves'.
May Day in apartheid South Africa was banned. Yet workers still marched, risking beatings, job losses and jail. In 1986, Cosatu called a two-day general strike. More than 1.5 million workers stayed away. The apartheid economy was brought to a standstill. The message was clear. The factories, the mines and the ports ran on black labour. That labour had withdrawn its consent.
What occurred was more than resistance. It was the assertion of class power. Joe Slovo described it best when he wrote: 'South Africa is not a colony but an independent state … A new type of colonialism was developed, in which the oppressing white nation occupied the same territory as the oppressed … Non-white South Africa is the colony of white South Africa itself.'
This strategic alliance between organised labour and the broader liberation movement culminated in the unbanning of political organisations in 1990 and democratic elections in 1994. But that moment of victory was also a pivot. In exchange for political freedom, economic power remained largely untouched. The working class won the vote but not the factory. They gained rights on paper, but faced a globalised neoliberal economy that demanded flexibility and austerity. Democracy was hollowed out by an elite consensus. Socialism, once central to the Freedom Charter, was pushed to the margins.
The labour market today is a testament to that betrayal. More than 31.9% of the population is unemployed. Among youth aged 15 to 24, the unemployment rate is 59.7%. These are not just statistics. They reflect a political economy that protects the rich while discarding the poor. The ruling bloc has failed to build even a basic social wage. Instead, mass unemployment has become permanent and systemic.
South African workers are not just unemployed. They are super-exploited. Of the employed, 35.9% are in informal work with no contracts or job security. A 2023 report by the University of Cape Town's Development Policy Research Unit shows that more than 70% of all new jobs created in the past five years have been precarious, short-term, low-wage or informal. Domestic workers and farmworkers remain among the most exploited groups.
Even among formally employed workers, nearly 40% earn less than R3,500 a month. The capitalist system, Lenin warned, 'does not simply enslave workers; it deprives them of dignity, of humanity'.
Real wages continue to decline. According to Statistics South Africa and the South African Reserve Bank, inflation-adjusted wages have dropped by more than 6.4% since 2020. During the same period, electricity prices increased by 45% and the cost of staple foods such as maize meal rose by 32%.
Meanwhile, the average JSE-listed chief executive earned R17.3 million annually in 2023. That is more than 500 times what a minimum wage worker earns. At Sibanye-Stillwater, the chief executive earned R189 million while mineworkers toil underground for less than R10,000 a month. This isn't mismanagement. It is the very logic of the system.
The Labour Relations Amendment Bill currently tabled at National Economic Development and Labour Council further undermines the gains made by unions over decades. It aims to curtail the right to strike, increase state oversight of unions and expand the definition of essential services to restrict collective action. These are not neutral reforms. They are class weapons. They seek to discipline the very movements that challenged racial capitalism.
The Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration, once a hard-fought institution, is being hollowed out. With more than R600 million cut from its budget since 2020, delays are now the norm. Workers wait for about 200 days for arbitration while employers act with impunity. Labour law, once a shield, is being refashioned into an instrument of erosion.
Meanwhile, outsourcing and labour broking remain central strategies of exploitation. In sectors such as cleaning and security, more than 48% of workers earn below the legal minimum wage. These jobs are racialised and gendered, designed to deepen inequality while expanding corporate profits. The post-apartheid state has allowed this to become the new normal.
We are told we must remain attractive to investors. But the only thing capital is attracted to is a cheap, fragmented and easily replaceable workforce. In this moment, the contradiction between capital and labour could not be more stark. Socialism is not a dream. It is the only credible response to a system that continues to impoverish the majority.
In the townships, the mines of Rustenburg, the farms of the Western Cape and the informal settlements surrounding every city, workers know they are not free. They may carry an identity document instead of a dompas, but they remain trapped in a system that sees them only as cost and liability.
The spirit of May Day demands reckoning, not ritual. Freedom Day, if it is to mean anything, must be understood as a project still incomplete. It is a promise denied by the continuation of racial capitalism in new clothes. The post-apartheid consensus, built on the myths of trickle-down growth and private investment-led development, has failed to deliver justice to the majority. The time for nostalgia is over.
As Walter Sisulu warned, 'We must never forget that our people's struggle was both for political and economic emancipation.' The former was achieved. The latter was deferred. And that deferral has now hardened into doctrine.
The terrain of struggle must shift. The labour movement must recover its historical mission. It must not only defend the rights won under democracy but fight for a fundamentally different future. This means breaking from party patronage networks, rejecting donor-driven funding and control that dilutes worker democracy, and returning to democratic shop-floor structures and mass-based organising.
It means placing socialism — real, living socialism — back on the agenda. Not as a slogan but as a practical programme for the redistribution of land, resources and power. As Lenin said, 'There can be no talk of real freedom without economic freedom.' The task of our generation is to build that freedom.
Chris Hani reminded us that, 'Socialism is about decent shelter for those who are homeless … It is about health care … a life of dignity for the old … and rolling back the tyranny of the market.'
Let us mark this May Day not with slogans but with renewed resolve. Let Freedom Day become not a commemoration but a confrontation with what remains undone. Because until the worker is free, South Africa is not free.
Mbuso Ngubane is the deputy general secretary of the National Union of Metalworkers South Africa. He writes in his personal capacity.