NEIL AGGETT LABOUR STUDIES UNIT (NALSU): Annual Neil Aggett Labour Studies Lecture
Dinga Sikwebu, "COSATU@40: Decades of political alignment and entanglement"
SEMINAR & WEBINAR: 4PM, Thursday 20 November 2025, Graham Hotel, 123 High Street, Makhanda, South Africa & via Zoom (details below).
ALL WELCOME
With COSATU approaching its 40th anniversary, this lecture examines the federation's long history of political alignment. Founded in December 1985, the federation became one of the world’s fastest growing union movements. It also demonstrated a remarkable dynamism and bottom-up worker politics. When the ANC and SACP were unbanned in 1990, the federation was at the heart of the mass democratic movement. To gain political influence, COSATU opted to be part of the Tripartite Alliance with the two organisations.
This lecture probes the efficacy of COSATU's political alignment strategy, including the original Alliance model, deployment of unionists onto election lists and repeated calls for workers to “swell the ranks of the ANC”. The lecture evaluates COSATU strategies to push for pro-working class policies through its alignment with the ANC, attempts to build a left axis with the SACP, as well as battles for Alliance reconfiguration. Beyond this, it examines deeper conceptual framings that underpin the strategy, including the understanding of politics and of unionism itself.
SPEAKER: Dinga Sikwebu is a retired trade unionist based in Johannesburg. He worked for 25-years as the head of education at the head office of the National Union of Metalworkers of SA (NUMSA). Presently, he is a Global Labour University (GLU) Research Associate at the University of the Witwatersrand.
JOINING ONLINE: If you are attending this blended event online, please register in advance at:
THE LECTURE: The Annual Neil Aggett Labour Studies Lecture is named in honour of Dr Neil Aggett, union organiser and medical doctor who died in 1982 in an apartheid jail. It is hosted by NALSU, Rhodes' University’s departments of Economics & Economic History and Sociology & Industrial Sociology. It is partnered with NALSU’s Vuyisile Mini Workers School, and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) project.
ABOUT NALSU: Based in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU) at Rhodes University is engaged in policy, research, and workers' education, has a democratic, non-sectarian, non-aligned, and pluralist practice, and active relations with a range of advocacy, labour, and research organisations. We draw strength from our location in a province where the legacy of apartheid and the cheap labour system, and post-apartheid contradictions, are keenly felt.
MORE: http://www.ru.ac.za/nalsu