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The author examines the impact of organised labour on the process of democratisation in Zimbabwe. However, the extent to which democratisation and economic reform has been achieved has been strongly conditioned, on the one hand, by the weaknesses and divisions within the opposition, and by strength and skills of the incumbent regime, on the other. The outcome is the current situation of stalemate in which the formations of working-class organisation have proved powerful enough to defend and win limited political rights, but too weak to topple the formidable edifice of the de facto one-party State in favour of a bourgeois democratic regime. This raises questions of strategy which are touched on at the end of this paper.

In 1958, Herman Benson, a longtime socialist and labor editor of a weekly New York tabloid, Labor Action, received a call about three leaders in a Chicago Machinist union local. They had challenged the questionable financial practices of the union business agent, but the union's international president was more upset about their distribution of handbills to members than any malfeasance by the business agent. He put the local under a trustee who promulgated rules banning distribution of any literature (even the Bill of Rights). As the local leaders carried on their protest, two of them were expelled by the president, A. L. Hayes, after he suppressed the results of an internal trial and issued his own verdict. It's an appalling story, but the kicker is that Hayes was also chairman of the new AFL-CIO Ethical Practices Committee.