The strike weapon is the cornerstone of union power. Its potency critically depends on its collective character, as individual workers cannot bring a factory to a standstill – and are easy to replace.

Most strikes erupt spontaneously and are followed by union authorisation. In such cases, management has less opportunity to plan a response than it does in official disputes. Wildcat strikes are often, therefore, the most effective way for workers to insist on a say in matters affecting them. Rick Fantasia remarks that solidarity is welded to the act of opposition, forged during the strike itself. Like Hyman, he believes that the spontaneous strike, independent of official bargaining routines, is often most effective in articulating and redressing grievances.

In the early 1980s, strikes returned in force to South African. More spontaneous strikes broke out on the East Rand in 1981–1982 than in any other period in South African labour history, and many of the strikers were not unionised. Mawu, and to some extent Naawu, understood that wildcat strikes could be harnessed to build national worker power. In its appreciation of the power of spontaneous action, it was heir to German socialist Rosa Luxemburg's theory of spontaneity. She wrote of the Russian revolutionary movement: ‘Its most important and fruitful tactical turns of the last decade were not “invented” by determinate leaders of the movement, and much less by leading organisations, but were … the spontaneous product of an unfettered movement itself.’ She asserted, echoing Vladimir Lenin, that ‘activity itself educates the masses’.

In metal, there were pivotal disputes which advanced labour's agenda and which show how power was built in a multifaceted way. These disputes struck at the heart of capitalist exploitation but also ruptured the apartheid mould when grand apartheid was at its height. In different ways, these strikes attacked divisions entrenched by the state. They expressed workers’ newfound confidence and determination to assert control over their working conditions, the fruit of the painstaking organisational work of the 1970s, and the new labour dispensation.