Still in pursuit of a Social Contract Between the State and South Africa’s Working People
On 12 August 1946, approximately 70,000 African mineworkers employed on the Witwatersrand walked off their jobs. They were demanding a minimum wage of ten shillings per day. The Smuts government responded with armed police and soldiers deployed underground. The strike was broken within a week. Workers were killed on the Reef. Hundreds more were injured. The Chamber of Mines resumed operations. The wages remained unchanged.
This happened two years before the National Party came to power. The legal architecture of racial labour exploitation was already in place before apartheid formalised it. The 1946 Mineworkers’ Strike did not simply reveal that architecture. It revealed what the system would do to defend it when workers organised to challenge it.
Workers’ Day is not a commemoration of a victory. It is the anniversary of a demand, still being made. It is a reminder that the struggle still continues!
LABOUR AS THE MECHANISM OF COLONIAL CONTROL
To understand what South African workers fought for in the liberation struggle, one must first fully grasp the interconnected, intricate, relationship between racial discrimination, class super-exploitation and gender oppression. Blacks had no rights in the political institutions of the country and no stake in its economy. In actual fact, for the longest time, since colonial invasion, they were regarded as the beasts of burden and temporary sojourners in South Africa.
To an observant reader, they would wonder why I say blacks had neither rights nor stake in the South African economy. If they were in South Africa, why do I exclude them from South Africa? The answer is simple, black people were not regarded as South Africans until 1994. Only white people were South Africans, the black majority were citizens of their respective bantustans and homeland reserves. There was a difference between saying there are X million South Africans and Y million people in South Africa. Even then, black people would have been temporarily lent the status of “people” as apartheid-colonialism did not regard them as such.
That is why South African workers could not confine their struggles only to the workplace, but had to transcend that narrow, albeit necessary, framework to embrace their broader strategic role in the national liberation struggle as the very pivot – the principal motive force – of that struggle. The trade union movement inexorably had to be an integral part of the broader progressive national liberation movement. COSATU’s role in the tripartite alliance was thus not a result of any conference resolution, but given birth by the concrete realities of oppression and the character of the struggle of the black majority.
Black workers were pivotal in the nature of oppression in South Africa; they were at the centre of the native problem which always both divided and united the white minority. The resolution of this problem has, for centuries, been the point of dispute among the white economic and political ruling bloc. The white working class, for their part, had long accepted a “peace offering” in terms of better wages, high skilled jobs and other incentives such as job security, the right to unionise and better working conditions that the ruling bloc offered them as an incentive to support the ruling class and even die on the battlefield to defend it. The unity of the working class across race thus became impossible to achieve as white workers tied their interests – hook, line and sinker – with the system of oppression existing in the country.
This super-exploitation of black workers was codified in law and made the country’s official policy.
The Industrial Conciliation Act of 1924 excluded from the statutory definition of “employee” those African workers described historically as “pass-bearing natives” — that is, those whose contracts of service were regulated by the pass laws and native labour regulations. The exclusion was precise and deliberate. African workers who were required under law to carry passes to move between urban areas were, by that same law, erased from the mechanisms through which every other category of recognised worker could organise collectively, bargain for wages, and protect themselves through strike action. The colour bar was not an informal social preference. It was a statutory instrument. Job reservation, codified under the Mines and Works Act of 1911 and extended in subsequent legislation, legally reserved skilled occupations in mining and industry for white workers. The Natives Land Act of 1913 had already dispossessed African families of land, making wage labour not a choice but a survival condition.
These laws worked together as an integrated system. Racial dispossession created dependence on the wage. Statutory exclusion from labour protections ensured that the wage remained exploitative. The pass system controlled movement and, through it, the price of African labour. Apartheid did not invent this system. It inherited it, entrenched it, and wrapped it in bureaucratic permanence.
The resistance to this system was therefore not simply a labour action. It was a counter-sovereign act. When workers organised clandestinely under the banner of the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU), founded in 1955 and allied with the African National Congress, they were not merely negotiating wages. They were refusing the governance framework that the wage system enforced. The Freedom Charter, adopted at the Congress of the People in Kliptown on 26 June 1955, made this explicit. Its labour clause reads: “There shall be work and security. All who work shall be free to form trade unions, to elect their officers and to make wage agreements with their employers; and the state shall recognise the right and duty of all to work and to draw full unemployment benefits.” These were not economic demands in a narrow sense. They were constitutional claims, made three and a half decades before a negotiated constitution would begin to give them institutional form.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), founded on 1 December 1985 in Durban, brought the labour movement into direct alignment with the national liberation project. Its formation gave the United Democratic Front its organisational backbone in workplaces that political structures could not reach. The workers who stayed away, marched, picketed, and organised through the final decade of apartheid were performing liberation as labour action. The two were not separate. The workplace was a site of the broader struggle because the apartheid economy depended on exactly the labour relations the workers were refusing. To organise was to understand this, and to act on the understanding.
THE CONSTITUTIONAL PROMISE AND WHAT IT INSTALLED
The post-1994 legislative framework was designed to dismantle what apartheid had constructed. Section 23 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996, recognises the right to fair labour practices, the right of every worker to form and join a trade union, the right to strike, and the right of every trade union to engage in collective bargaining. The Labour Relations Act 66 of 1995, the Basic Conditions of Employment Act 75 of 1997, the Employment Equity Act 55 of 1998, and the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Act 53 of 2003 were the statutory instruments through which the constitutional promise was to be operationalised. The National Economic Development and Labour Council (NEDLAC), established by Act 35 of 1994, institutionalised the tripartite social compact through which labour, business, and government would negotiate the country’s economic direction.
The architecture was deliberate and was built by people who understood what the absence of such architecture had cost. COSATU’s role in negotiating the post-apartheid labour framework was not incidental. The movement that had organised workers into the liberation struggle now negotiated the institutional form that would govern their working lives. The legislative construction from 1994 to 2003 represents the most serious and sustained attempt in the country’s history to translate worker rights from rhetoric into legal obligation.
That is the inheritance. The question, in 2026, is whether the inheritance has been honoured.
THREE DECADES LATER: UNEMPLOYMENT AS GOVERNANCE FAILURE
South Africa’s official unemployment rate stood at 31.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2025, according to Statistics South Africa’s Quarterly Labour Force Survey. On the broader labour underutilisation measure — the LU3, which incorporates discouraged work-seekers who have stopped actively looking for work — the rate was 42.1 percent. Among those aged fifteen to twenty-four, the official unemployment rate was 57 percent. More than half of young South Africans cannot find work. This is not a rounding error in a development trajectory. It is a structural condition that has compounded across three decades of democratic governance.
The dominant public framing of this condition treats it as a market failure, or as a skills problem, or as a consequence of global economic headwinds. Each of these analyses contains truth. None of them is the complete truth.
As well as a structural failure, the unemployment crisis is, at its root, a governance failure. A state that constructed the most sophisticated legislative framework for labour rights in the country’s history and then failed to ensure that the formal economy was of sufficient scale and quality to absorb its citizens into it has failed at the first obligation the Freedom Charter identified: the right and duty of all to work. The failure of South Africa’s basic education system to produce graduates with skills the economy can employ, and the failure of successive administrations to coordinate skills investment with identifiable labour market demand, are policy failures. The contraction of manufacturing as a share of GDP, which has stripped out the entry-level formal employment that absorbed earlier generations without tertiary credentials, is the consequence of industrial policy that was never sustained at the scale it required. These are not acts of God. They are the results of governance choices, including the choice to defer structural interventions whose political costs were immediate and whose economic returns were a generation away.
To frame youth unemployment as a market failure is to absolve the state of the obligation the constitutional framework placed on it. The obligation is not to guarantee employment. The obligation is to create the conditions in which employment is possible, and to ensure that where the market fails to create those conditions, the state intervenes with sufficient scale, coordination, and discipline to correct the failure.
WHAT GOVERNMENT HAS TRIED, AND THE HONEST ASSESSMENT
The state has not been inactive. Post-1994 policies have created millions of employment opportunities. The Presidential Youth Employment Initiative (PYEI), launched in 2020, placed over a million young people into public employment opportunities across social sectors. The Extended Public Works Programme (EPWP) has, since its inception in 2004, provided temporary employment to millions of South Africans in public infrastructure and community service delivery. The National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) has expanded access to tertiary education for students from low-income households who would otherwise have been excluded entirely. The National Youth Development Agency (NYDA) provides entrepreneurship support and skills development. The Sector Education and Training Authorities (SETAs), funded through payroll levies, were designed to coordinate skills development with sectoral labour demand.
The honest assessment of these programmes is that they have demonstrated the state can generate participation numbers. They have not demonstrated that the state can generate structural change.
The PYEI’s employment is temporary and sector-specific. It creates income flow, not career pathways. The EPWP provides experience in public works rather than in the sectors where private sector demand exists. NSFAS has expanded access to qualifications without addressing the structural mismatch between what the tertiary system produces and what employers require. The NYDA operates at a scale that is insufficient relative to the problem it was established to address. The SETAs have been plagued by governance failures that have diverted levy income from training into administration and, in documented cases, into corruption.
The deeper problem is structural rather than programmatic. These programmes have been anchored on a vibrant and comprehensive industrial policy that addresses the structural defects of the apartheid-colonial system and charts a new trajectory for the New South African economy. In practice, however, they were designed largely in isolation from one another, with separate mandates, separate reporting lines, and separate definitions of success. A young person transitioning from NYDA entrepreneurship support to NSFAS funding for a technical qualification to a PYEI placement in the public sector has encountered three separate programme architectures, none of which was designed to connect to the others. The result is a social safety net with significant gaps and limited pathway logic, rather than an integrated system designed to move young people from exclusion into productive economic participation.
The Youth Employment Service (YES), launched in 2018 through a public-private partnership between the Presidency and South African business, was designed to address this gap by incentivising private sector employers to absorb young workers through enhanced B-BBEE recognition. Its design reflected a genuine understanding of the problem. Its implementation has been constrained by the quality of private sector commitment and by the absence of monitoring mechanisms with sufficient institutional authority to enforce the spirit of participation alongside its letter. Ultimately, any employment opportunity must link government interventions such as EPWP, PYEI and YES, as well as internship and learnership programmes, to real, sustainable and decent work provided by industry.
BBBEE: THE PROMISE AND THE LIMITS OF ITS APPLICATION
Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment was designed to do something historically unprecedented: to correct the concentrated racial ownership of the South African economy without expropriation, through a framework of legislative incentives that would redirect investment, ownership, employment, and skills development toward the black majority. The Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Act 53 of 2003, and the Codes of Good Practice issued under it, created a scorecard system covering ownership, management control, skills development, enterprise and supplier development, and socioeconomic development.
The diagnosis was correct. The condition of the South African economy at the moment of democratic transition was one in which the overwhelming majority of productive assets were owned by a small, racially concentrated minority. The correction of that condition is not a social preference. It is an economic necessity. An economy in which the majority of the population is excluded from ownership and management of productive assets cannot generate the domestic demand, the human capital, or the innovation base required to grow at the rates necessary to absorb its population into formal employment.
The performance of BBBEE against its own objectives has been partial. Ownership representation has advanced in listed companies where the legislative obligation is most directly enforced. Management representation has improved in forms that are visible on organisational charts without always reflecting genuine authority or genuine transformation of corporate decision-making. Skills development spending has increased without consistently connecting to verified employment outcomes. The most persistent and damaging critique of BBBEE’s implementation is not that its objectives were wrong — they were not — but that its benefits have been captured disproportionately by a narrow elite. The creation of black billionaires alongside mass black unemployment is not an argument against the principle of redistribution. It is an argument against a framework that measured redistribution by the wealth of those at the top while failing to measure it by the conditions of the majority at the bottom.
Fronting — the practice of formal compliance through structures that do not represent genuine black ownership or control — has been documented extensively and has undermined the framework’s credibility in sectors where it is most visible. The B-BBEE Commission, established by the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Amendment Act 46 of 2013 to investigate and penalise fronting, has demonstrated that the state can identify the problem. It has not yet demonstrated that its enforcement capacity matches the scale of the practice it was constituted to address.
What is required is not the abandonment of BBBEE. The framework corrects a historical distortion that would, without intervention, simply reproduce itself across generations. What is required is a recalibration of the framework toward productive economic participation rather than representational compliance. Ownership scores that do not connect to employment generation, skills development spending that cannot be traced to employed graduates, and enterprise development contributions that fund consultants rather than viable, market-competitive black-owned businesses represent compliance without consequence. The scorecard must be re-anchored to verifiable employment outcomes, to the development of black-owned enterprises that compete in the open economy rather than depend on procurement preferences, and to skills investment that is explicitly tied to documented labour market demand. The B-BBEE Commission needs both the resources and the institutional mandate to function as an enforcement body with real consequences, not merely an investigative body that documents failure after it has occurred.
THE SOCIAL COMPACT AND WHAT IT ACTUALLY REQUIRES
Public-private partnership has become sufficiently vague in South African policy discourse to mean almost anything. In its most reduced form, it means government inviting business to fund public goods. In its most substantive form, it means a genuine shared commitment to economic outcomes, with shared risk, shared resources, and shared accountability. The latter is what the country requires and has not consistently achieved.
The social compact that NEDLAC was designed to institutionalise requires that business, labour, and government each bring real commitments with verifiable consequences attached to them. A business sector that advocates for labour market flexibility without committing to employment expansion is participating in the negotiation without accepting its obligations. A government that legislates without implementing effectively, and that sets targets without monitoring systems capable of tracking performance, creates the appearance of accountability without its substance. A labour movement that protects the interests of currently employed workers at the cost of the barriers to entry that exclude the unemployed, particularly young people who have never held formal employment, is protecting a constituency that structurally excludes the majority of its potential members.
The youth unemployment crisis is not a problem that any single actor can solve. It is a structural problem that requires the coordinated commitment of all three social compact partners, sustained over a timeframe that exceeds any single electoral cycle, with monitoring mechanisms that make evasion of obligation publicly visible and institutionally costly.
The government must define the Social Contract, clarify roles and responsibilities, and ensure it serves ordinary South Africans—prioritising duties over benefits. It must prevent the private sector from co-opting the Contract for self-interest or dictating investment terms. South Africa’s historically parasitic, self-absorbed private sector has ignored broader societal needs, with racial dimensions that cannot be overlooked. A laissez-faire approach to shaping the Contract is unacceptable.
The Contract must dismantle racial capitalism and not slip into “deracialised bourgeois democracy.” It calls on all key sectors to forge dynamic, collaborative relations toward a shared national vision. The national capitalist elite’s continued allegiance to imperialist and former colonial interests undermines this agenda.
True developmentalism demands a strong, autonomous state bureaucracy, alongside developmentalist labour, corporate, civil society, and state sectors. The goal is not GDP growth alone, but comprehensive human development – the two are related but distinct, guiding different policy choices.
Workers’ Day in South Africa falls against an unemployment landscape that those who organised in 1946, who wrote the Freedom Charter in 1955, who built COSATU in 1985 would recognise immediately. Not because the legal framework has not changed. It has changed fundamentally. Not because the political settlement was not achieved. It was achieved at enormous cost. But because the social contract that the political settlement was supposed to install has not been taken seriously, with sufficient consistency and accountability, by all of the parties whose commitment its implementation requires.
The workers who built the liberation struggle understood that the fight for labour rights was not a separate project from the fight for political rights. They were the same fight. The mine shaft, the factory floor, the domestic worker’s room were as much sites of colonial control as the parliament in Pretoria. Those who stayed away, who struck, who organised through decades of suppression were performing the same act as the political prisoners on Robben Island. They were refusing to accept the governance of their lives by a system that treated them as instruments rather than citizens.
That reckoning does not exempt any administration, including those in which the author served. The structural failures identified here were not caused by one government, one minister, or one political era. They were compounded across thirty years of democratic governance by the combined failures of all three social compact partners — and the obligation to correct them belongs equally to all.
What is owed to them, and to the generations who have inherited their struggle without yet inheriting its economic outcome, is not gratitude expressed on a public holiday. It is institutional seriousness. It is a government that monitors the implementation of what it enacts. It is a business sector that takes its social compact commitments as seriously as it takes its returns to shareholders. It is a labour movement that brings to the cause of the unemployed the same organisational ferocity it has always brought to the cause of those already inside the system. It is a BBBEE framework that measures itself by businesses built and workers absorbed into sustainable employment, not by scores achieved and regulatory boxes ticked.
Workers’ Day is not an occasion for celebration in a country where 57 percent of young people aged fifteen to twenty-four cannot find work. It is an occasion for reckoning. The social contract is not a document. It is a practice. And in 2026, the practice is not yet equal to the promise the workers of 1946 made their lives into demanding.
That is what this day asks us to reckon with.
The future is not an accident.
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Dr Malusi Gigaba is a Scholar-Statesman and former Cabinet Minister of the Republic of South Africa. He currently serves as Co-Chair of the Joint Standing Committee on Defence.