INTRODUCTION

The skills issue has historically been central to the formation of the trade union movement in South Africa and has been informed by racial divisions within the broader society. The history of the skills question in South Africa is a history of exclusion and inclusion shaped by political developments during specific periods of South African history. According to Gerald Kraak (1993), the predominantly African trade unions which emerged in the 1970s and 1980s did so alongside an established trade union movement which represented largely skilled white, coloured and Indian workers who were often hostile to the new unions.

In a context of sanctions that affected the South African apartheid economy during the 1980s, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) commissioned several studies under the Industrial Strategy Project to investigate ways of improving the country's manufacturing performance. The skills question arose within the unions during this period of various attempts at seeking to rebuild the economy while enhancing the skills of workers and the broader population.

The labour movement had conceptualised South Africa's post-apartheid skills development dispensation since the early 1990s, and embarked on various initiatives to strengthen its capacity to engage on matters of economic restructuring. These include Cosatu's Economic Trends Research Group, Numsa's Vocational Training Project and its Research and Development Groups which sought to articulate a vision for industrial, economic and skills training policies. As Bhabhali ka Maphikela Nhlapho (2019, 58) states, ‘in our country it was the labour unions that sought the change in skills-development processes and advised the new democratic government that it needs to depart from the practices of the apartheid state’.

The skills debate is rooted in the larger political and ideological contestations about the ideology of competitiveness and the future of struggle in the unions. Numsa's adoption of skills-based grading systems was heavily contested within unions, and was seen to be a departure from ideas of emancipatory education that had formed part of the popular vision of trade unions for a post-apartheid skills development dispensation (Kodisang 2018). This departure was influenced largely by the changing global balance of forces and the influence of a small group of intellectuals within the unions.

The so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, according to Klaus Schwab (2016, 37), builds on the third industrial revolution by introducing artificial intelligence – that is, software technologies that make computers or robots perform tasks similarly to or better than human beings.