Women are essential to revitalising trade unions

IN AUGUST, South Africans honour the courage of women in the struggle for freedom, dignity, and equality.

- DR RENEVA FOURIE

The unveiling of Dora Tamana’s tombstone last Saturday, along with the commemoration of the assassination of Ruth First, 43 years ago on the 17th, and the birth of Dulcie September 90 years ago on the 20th, lends significance to the month.

Their lives demonstrate the interconnectedness of the struggles of women, workers, and communities, holding lessons for the contemporary trade union movement, which faces significant challenges spanning technological disruption to organisational fragmentation.

Dora Tamana understood that the daily struggles of women in the townships were intimately linked to the struggles of workers in factories and on the land. Her activism around food security and her leadership in the Federation of South African Women and the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA/SACP) demonstrated that the liberation of women cannot be separated from the liberation of the working class. She deftly drew the connections between poverty, unemployment, race, and gender, strengthening the foundation for mass-based resistance to apartheid capitalism.

Ruth First, born to founding members of the CPSA/SACP, was the first national secretary of the Young Communist League. She embodied the role of the intellectual activist whose journalism and scholarship were embedded within social movements and trade unionism.

She exposed the workings of apartheid capitalism, highlighting its transnational nature and providing workers and activists with the analytical tools to challenge exploitation. Her life illustrates that the struggle is not only waged in factories and on picket lines, but also in the battle of ideas, where analytical astuteness empowers grassroots and shopfloor action.