The decision to expel the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) may be described as the end of an era, but what the numbers show is that trade unionism in South Africa has been experiencing fundamental shifts and a downward trend for years.
Trade union membership grew from 2.9-million in 1994 to 3.4-million in 2012, according to the latest South Africa Survey published by the Institute of Race Relations, which cites a wide range of sources in its data on industrial relations.
