African Trade Unions: Progress or Poverty?

Abstract

It is widely believed that African trade unions have nothing to lose but their subordination to the state, are weak, inactive, ineffective in behalf of members, their leaders coopted by the state, while rank and file members are seen to have little consciousness of their interests but, nonetheless, to have benefitted disproportionately in income relative to other wage workers and peasant farmers. Many of these contentions are discussed by the authors of the above books, which one welcomes in light of the sparseness of literature on African workers and trade unions. One regrets profoundly, however, that the locale of publication, hardback form, and prices mean that African trade unionists will not have access to these books, as is true for most other works on African unions, except those by Roper (1958) and Davies (1966). Despite those new volumes, it is clear that we have far too little literature available on which to hazard easy generalizations about African trade unions. Friedland (1972) has observed that there were only nineteen major works on