Unions in Africa have extended their activities beyond their traditional European remit, but face a challenge from the number of informal works on the continent. The nature of unions and strikes are changing, writes Bettina Engels.
African trade unions are actors in struggles for radical change to political and economic structures. Nevertheless, they primarily represent the interests of regular contracted workers in the formal sector. This is a minority of the working people worldwide, which reflects the dubious narrow notion of labour under capitalism. Despite this, Africa is home to dynamic and evolving forms of industrial action.
In Mali, lectures at most universities are on strike for the third week. They’ve not been at work since 27 January 2025. They claim the payment of a research bonus that has been promised to them since 2017 has not been paid. On 9 December 2024, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the network of university teacher associations announced an unlimited strike, calling for an increase in salaries. In 2022, Nigerian university lecturers went on strike for eight months from February to October 2022 – their 17th strike within 23 years.
In most African countries, public sector unions are the largest unions in terms of membership. The public sector is the largest employer in many countries and the most important source of formal waged income. Almost 70 per cent of all formal employment in the DRC is in the public sector, and over 60 per cent in Botswana, Burkina Faso, Chad and Ghana, according to the International Labour Organisation.
All over Africa, strikes are happening in industries you wouldn’t expect to see industrial action. In October 2024, livestock sellers in Mali’s capital Bamako called an indefinite strike to protest against the decision of the authorities to relocate the livestock market. In August 2024, the Senegalese press went on strike. However, it was not employees against the media companies, but the heads of the publishing houses who called for a ‘press-free day’ in protest against the government’s restrictions on freedom of the press. In early June 2024, lawyers in Burkina Faso paralyzed the courts with a strike to protest against the imprisonment of their colleague Guy Hervé.
Strikes are not only a means of struggle between labour and capital. Strikes are a key means of collective action in social conflict, deeply inscribed in a society’s culture of conflict – a ‘repertoire of contention’, as Charles Tilly called it. This repertoire is extended beyond capital-labour conflicts, struggles over wages, and working conditions. High school and university students, refugees, and informal sector workers all go on strike. Though their strikes do not cause economic damage to the employer they address their claims to.
The role of trade unions
Organised labour plays a key role in mass protests such as those in Nigeria in August 2024 against President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s austerity policy. Trade unions were central in these protests and faced substantial repression. Nigerian trade unions consider themselves mass organisations; they have a militant tradition and are certainly more combative than almost all of their counterparts in the global North.
Historically, African trade unions have been key actors in struggles for national liberation, decolonisation and against apartheid, extending their mandate beyond labour-related issues. It required their engagement in wider social and political alliances. However, they are membership-based workers’ organisations, and ‘workers’ continues to mean, first and foremost, people in more or less formally contracted employment status.
The worker and the union
Focusing on waged labour somehow reflects a Eurocentric perspective that universalises the concept of waged labour in the factories at the time of the emergence of capitalism in Europe.
Most people in the global South (and increasingly, in the North likewise) are not engaged in formal and relatively secured waged labour. They are handicraft producers, artisanal miners, petty traders, agricultural labourers, care workers and others, and they do unpaid reproductive work. Between 80-95 per cent of African workers are engaged in the so-called informal economy. That large numbers of people are engaged in formal, relatively secured employment is a historical exception rather than the norm in global capitalism. Informal, precarious, unfree and unpaid labour is and has always been, key to capitalism. Thus, our picture of capitalism – whether as a system of accumulation on a world scale or more narrowly as a set of spatially and temporally bound relations of production – [is never] complete without taking such forms of work into account.“
If precarious and informal work is expanding, this does not mean “the end of trade unionism as we know it“. Informal workers are sparsely represented in trade unions but are present in a range of other organisations: workers’ associations, women’s associations, cooperatives, and others. This does not have to be an either/or situation. For example, in the 1990s the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions sought to organise informal workers by allowing their organisations to become associate members of the federation and providing them with some funds. In other cases, for example in the urban transport sector in Dar es Salaam, the organisation of informal minibus workers and the transport trade union entered into an alliance, with advantages for both sides.
Many different organisations and collective actors consider themselves ‘unions’, for example, student unions, unions of artisanal miners or other ‘informal’ and precarious workers, of the unemployed or small peasants throughout the world. Industrial unions by no means have a monopoly on the term and no exclusivity over the form of organisation, just as they have no exclusive claim on striking as a means of collective action.
Trade unions are important as workers’ organisations – mainly of workers in the narrower sense. However, trade unions can also be actors for the radical transformation of structures in capitalism and ultimately for dismantling it. To this end, it is essential to overcome the narrowly defined notion of ‘labour’ and ‘worker’. The extent to which informal workers and unpaid labour can and should be represented by trade unions themselves or through cooperation with other collective actors remains to be identified as context-related.
This post is based on the editorial to ROAPE’s recent issue no. 182 on “Workers, protests and trade unions in Africa”.
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