Channelling Thatcher, South Africa’s President takes on its unions

In 1987, an anti-apartheid firebrand named Cyril Ramaphosa led South Africa’s biggest-ever mining strike. Some 300 000 miners – from a union Ramaphosa himself had founded – walked off the job, protesting pay and working conditions. The mining company “used fascist methods to destroy workers’ lives,” Ramaphosa declared. Over the three-week strike, nine people were killed, 500 were injured and more than 50 000 were fired. Still, it demonstrated the power that organised labour could exercise and the economic damage it could inflict on South Africa.