---
title: "Why business should despair over the demise of Cosatu"
description: "With the disintegration of the trade union federation, the breakdown of structured negotiation and worker protections poses significant risks for both labour rights and business stability."
type: "NewsArticle"
publisher: "Daily Maverick"
site: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za"
section: "AFTER THE BELL"
author: "Stephen Grootes"
author_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/author/stephengrootes/"
canonical_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2026-09-15-why-business-should-despair-over-the-demise-of-cosatu/"
published: "2026-09-15T19:57:37"
lang: "en-ZA"
word_count: 842
---

# Why business should despair over the demise of Cosatu

> With the disintegration of the trade union federation, the breakdown of structured negotiation and worker protections poses significant risks for both labour rights and business stability.

By Stephen Grootes · Published 15 September 2026, 21:57 SAST

## Key points
- Cosatu’s national conference collapsed amid a vicious credentials fight — the federation is publicly tearing itself apart, mirroring wider social disintegration.
- For business, union fragmentation is deadly: multiple unions mean competing leaders, harsher demands, shop‑floor clashes and no single interlocutor to negotiate with.
- Beyond wages, unions enforced rules, took employers and governments to court, and forged multiracial solidarity and space for minorities — protections that are now at risk.
- The consequence: workers become more exposed and demoralised, productivity and long‑term investment fall, and firms face greater instability — reason enough for business to despair.

## Content

There are times when I can only despair at our unions.

Especially when they do things that are just stupid or counterproductive.

Often, South African Municipal Workers’ Union members have been the worst. The people who, during a strike, will take rubbish bins and trash a street.

When I’ve had arguments with their leaders about this they’ve always said that workers will use the tools of their trade for political expression.

Strangely, members of the South African National Defence Union, representing soldiers, have never used this argument.

But there is something tragic about watching trade union federation Cosatu tear itself apart in public.

I almost feel that our national fabric is being ripped along with it.

\[And President Ramaphosa’s legacy ... he was instrumental in its foundation. – *Editorial note*\]

Yesterday they were not able to get their conference going because there was a big fight about credentials.

As a reader of ATB you’re probably enough of a person of the world to know what that really means. It’s about who can vote and who cannot and therefore who the new leader of Cosatu will be.

In normal times, I kinda wouldn’t really mind that much. So what?

Except that for anyone trying to run a business that will be sustainable in this country for a long time, this is actually a big deal.

What’s happening in Cosatu is emblematic of what’s happening in the rest of our society, the sort of disintegration of the structures that brought us together.

I think it’s really going to matter to firms because when unions start to disintegrate very bad things happen.

First, you lose the ability to have just one person to deal with.

If you have a factory with just one union, the leaders of the union and the people running the factory know each other. They will work out how to get along, how the other takes their tea and how to negotiate.

But when you have more than one union, competition enters the fray. And that means union leaders compete with each other for members.

And they do that by making more and more extreme demands of management.

As if that were not bad enough, you might be confronted with fighting over union members on the shop floor. Now you have to stop a dispute that you have nothing to do with, involving two people who are supposed to oppose you.

But wait, there’s more.

You might be astonished by how often business and unions work together.

There are all sorts of joint initiatives and plans and working groups where workers and business leaders are able to join up for the good of society.

I would argue that without unions and businesses working together against Jacob Zuma in 2016 and 2017, he might not have lost in the way that he did.

But I think there is a much more fundamental reason to worry about the demise of our union movement.

If unions stand for anything it is representing their workers. And they do that through ensuring the rules are followed.

When a worker is fired unfairly they use the rules to fight back. They go to court when the government or a business does something illegal, and they often win.

In the process unions do something else.

From the very formation of the first big union of our modern era, the National Union of Mineworkers, unions have brought people from very different parts of our society together.

In the case of that union it was mineworkers who had previously been in compounds according to language and ethnic group. Together they were an unstoppable force. Even for the apartheid state at the time.

The same has been true of so many other unions.

The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, currently the biggest union in the country, represents hundreds of thousands of workers from all over South Africa who speak different languages and have different traditions.

In the process these movements have created a multigroup and multiracial consciousness, where people follow rules and work together.

Crucially, they have also created space for minority groups, including gay and lesbian people, to achieve their own ambitions for equality.

And that has had a huge impact on all of us. I’d argue that without the modern union movement in South Africa our society would look very different.

When this starts to disintegrate, as it is now, the entire environment around business starts to disintegrate with it.

There will be more and more groups of people competing with each other, making it harder to reach any kind of agreement.

And for workers, people who will one day rise through your business to become the CEO themselves, it’s even worse.

They will find themselves exposed, vulnerable to all kinds of abuse.

That means they will not be nearly as productive and will probably lose all of their ambition to help the company they work for do well.

The demise of the union movement is terrible for workers.

But it’s tragic for business too. **DM**