Charismatic community leader and Ford Motor Company worker, Thozamile Botha, escaped Port Elizabeth on May 1, 1980. After receiving a government ban order that placed him under house arrest and constant police surveillance, Botha crossed into the Transkei and then hopped the border into Lesotho, the landlocked kingdom surrounded by South Africa. There, Botha was granted asylum.Footnote ¹

Botha had recently inspired collective worker action in the Eastern Cape, even though workers were aware of the risks they faced for challenging the status quo. Ford Motor Company, which had manufacturing facilities in Port Elizabeth, was perhaps at its most vulnerable. The South African subsidiary had recently signed the Sullivan Principles, a voluntary, U.S.-drawn code of conduct that committed it to workplace reform, desegregation, and promotion of Black workers to management positions, among other goals. But after two years of Ford’s attempts to implement change, workers had grown impatient with the pace of reform. The company’s attitude remained deeply anti-union while workers faced an ever-rising cost of living outside of the factory gates.

A June 1979 layoff of more than three hundred workers from Ford’s Struandale Cortina plant in Port Elizabeth led workers to strike.Footnote ² Under the leadership of Thozamile Botha and the Ford Workers’ Committee, a series of strikes began on October 30, 1979. The walkout of the entire African workforce at Ford shocked management. Reports showed that the strike in sympathy with Botha enhanced the township leader’s stature by winning him and his organization national and even international coverage.Footnote ³ Compounding the pressure, the US-based United Automobile Workers (UAW) targeted Ford Motor Company in Detroit.Footnote ⁴ Ford promptly called on local management in South Africa, highlighting their frustrations.Footnote ⁵ Eventually, the U.S. Consul-General in Cape Town became involved and advocated for the rehiring of the fired Ford workers. Ford finally agreed to reinstate all of its employees.Footnote ⁶ It became clear that the company could not simply sign the Sullivan Principles while doing very little to implement them.

Botha’s eventual exile as a Black community and workplace organizer mirrored that of many other Black leaders in apartheid South Africa. By 1980, much of the trade union movement had met a similar fate, with many of its leaders effectively pushed into exile. The multiracial unions operating within the country faced persistent violent repression. Although South African management enforced apartheid, the Global North financed it, providing material and rhetorical support to corporations and the South African government. Moments like the 1979 Ford strike revealed the central paradox of corporate reform in South Africa: codes of conduct promised progress, but workers themselves bore the risks and transformed these reforms into tools of resistance. It is this tension that animates my dissertation.

“Diplomacy at Work: The South African Worker, U.S. Multinationals, and Transnational Racial Solidarity” argues that South African workers repurposed corporate reform initiatives—especially the U.S.-designed Sullivan Principles—to build transnational labor solidarities and contest apartheid from the shop-floor. By following these workers’ negotiations with multinational managers and U.S. trade unions, the project repositions labor as an active agent of diplomacy and corporate ethics in the late Cold War period. South African workers and trade unionists are placed at the center of global narratives of labor, race, and foreign affairs. By centering workers’ voices, I argue that weak corporate reforms were not merely symbolic gestures, but became tools that workers themselves repurposed in order to both challenge apartheid in the multinational workplace and forge worker solidarities across borders.

In the context of the 1970s, apartheid’s racialized labor regime was sustained not only through the South African state but through multinational capital. The Industrial Conciliation Act legally reserved skilled jobs for white workers, while Black South Africans were excluded from trade union membership and even from legal classification as employees. Fearing the encroachment of African decolonization to the north, the ruling National Party had long since banned the African National Congress (ANC) and Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), jailed their leadership, and driven the multiracial South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) into exile. Meanwhile, the U.S. government remained hesitant to confront apartheid directly. Anticommunism shaped its foreign policy, and South Africa—rich in gold, platinum, and uranium—was a key ally.Footnote ⁷ By the early 1970s, twelve of the fifteen largest U.S. corporations held substantial investments in South Africa’s manufacturing, petroleum, and mining sectors, yielding some of the highest rates of return in the world.Footnote ⁸

It was within this political economy of apartheid that U.S. corporate reform took root. The rise of codes of conduct, such as the Sullivan Principles, must be understood not only as a moral response but as a strategic attempt to reconcile profit, politics, and public image during a decade of growing unrest. Workers and unionists held multinational corporations in South Africa accountable to reforms and tested the limits of what was possible under a system of sophisticated restriction. The result was “anti-apartheid worker internationalism”: a transnational politics forged through everyday resistance, union organizing, and connections with Black trade unionists and activists abroad. Ultimately, the dissertation demonstrates how local struggles against apartheid reverberated into international debates on corporate power, racial justice, and economic sanctions.

The existing scholarship on the struggle against apartheid is rich.Footnote ⁹ While much of the globally oriented literature has emphasized U.S. corporations, elite policymakers, or grassroots activists, the literature rarely engages with South African labor history. “Diplomacy at Work” remedies this by bringing together diplomatic history, labor studies, business history, and African history to show how workers shaped U.S. foreign policy from the shop-floor. This interdisciplinary framing allows the dissertation to speak to debates in the history of capitalism and in South African labor studies, showing that the shop-floor was not only a site of production but also a space of diplomacy.

The dissertation brings the voices of South African workers to the front, drawing on trade union archives, newsletter clippings, worker memoirs, and author-conducted oral history interviews.Footnote ¹⁰ Many of these interviews highlighted how the South African trade union movement was global, often connecting South African workplace struggles to the larger fight against apartheid. Thus, “Diplomacy at Work” builds on histories of labor by placing U.S. and South African trade unionists and their contributions to the movement against apartheid in a global framework. Global trade unionist networks aided South African trade unions and advanced the cause of anti-apartheid.

Far from isolated, South African workers were part of the global conversation, often shaping the direction of the struggle and drawing in workers and labor movement leaders from the United States. Building on the work of Peter Cole, Elizabeth Esch, and Roger Southall, among others, the dissertation places the South African labor movement in a broader conversation about worker and corporate power, in both the United States and South Africa.Footnote ¹¹ Anti-apartheid worker internationalism encouraged workers to view their struggles as linked to worker struggles abroad.

Interest in the Sullivan Principles in particular builds on earlier work from business schools, as well as some activist literature.Footnote ¹² Elizabeth Schmidt authored an early critique of the Sullivan Principles around the time of the code’s release. She argued that corporate codes either were ineffectual or actually prolonged apartheid by giving corporations a reformist “camouflage”—consisting of vague promises of Black advancement and the gradual erasure of apartheid in the workplace.Footnote ¹³ More recently, scholars have considered how the code’s author Leon Sullivan situated himself in the broader civil rights and Black Power movements, or have highlighted the anti-apartheid efforts of U.S. corporations.Footnote ¹⁴ Jessica Levy’s dissertation, notably a Krooss Prize winner, has encouraged scholars to revisit the Sullivan Principles and to place business history and Black Studies in conversation. Sullivan felt pressure from both conservative businessmen hostile to change and from anti-apartheid activists who imagined a full break with apartheid South Africa via economic sanctions. Finally, Zeb Larson also authored a recent piece on the Sullivan Principles, one that broadly outlines the code and considers its many limitations, which he argues were etched into the code’s language from the start.Footnote ¹⁵ U.S. multinationals, activists, and Black American leaders recognized that apartheid—at work or otherwise—was incompatible with a liberal society.

I view these reformist codes differently. Without denying that some U.S. corporate leaders intended for the codes to provide camouflage to apartheid, I argue that South African workers successfully employed them as levers for achieving greater racial equality. Thus, “Diplomacy at Work” uncovers how workers carved their own spaces in the anti-apartheid movement, using workplace reforms which, although unequivocally weak on the surface, allowed for transnational support against apartheid. More broadly, “Diplomacy at Work” challenges existing late Cold War narratives of a weakened South African-led anti-apartheid movement and of a decline in trade union strength on a global scale.

The international visibility of South African labor was not accidental. In 1973, over sixty thousand workers in Durban (some estimates place the number closer to one hundred thousand) staged spontaneous strikes across nearly one hundred fifty factories, demanding higher wages.Footnote ¹⁶ These seismic walkouts caught the apartheid regime off guard and marked a turning point: for the first time since the 1950s, Black workers demonstrated their ability to organize and confront state and corporate power. Three years later, on June 16, 1976, thousands of Black South African students in Soweto protested the enforcement of Afrikaans-language instruction in schools. Police opened fire on the protestors, killing hundreds and sparking global outrage.Footnote ¹⁷ Durban and Soweto galvanized both domestic and international opposition to apartheid. They revealed that the regime could be challenged from below and that multinational corporations could no longer ignore their complicity.

The global attention following Soweto gave new urgency to reformist projects like the Sullivan Principles, especially since American business in South Africa was already a target of anti-apartheid criticism. How long could they remain in South Africa, where they abided by apartheid law? Their image was important. Addressing this ongoing dilemma, in March 1971, General Motors chairman James Roche appointed Black activist and pastor Leon Sullivan to the corporation’s Board of Directors. As the U.S. automobile company’s first Black board member, Sullivan promptly turned his gaze toward GM’s operations in apartheid South Africa. Drawing explicit parallels between segregation in the United States and apartheid in South Africa, Sullivan condemned GM’s complicity with apartheid. After many years of debate, Sullivan grew convinced that U.S. multinationals were uniquely positioned to create positive change in South Africa and reverse the patterns of corporate-supported violence.

One of Sullivan’s namesake achievements, the Sullivan Principles, was a set of six provisions that called for U.S. multinational companies with South African operations to desegregate the workplace and initiate equal pay for equal work.Footnote ¹⁸ The code boasted twelve original signatories.Footnote ¹⁹ This number quickly blossomed to over one hundred fifty within a few years. The signatories paid an annual fee to Sullivan’s International Council of Equality of Opportunity Principles, which oversaw the implementation of the code. The Arthur D. Little firm, based out of Massachusetts, compiled corporate self-evaluations and distributed annual reports that summarized corporate compliance with the Sullivan Principles. Many corporations proved efficient at desegregating their workplaces, yet failed to effectively promote Black workers or increase worker pay.

South African trade unions were on the receiving end. Some conducted their own audits of these corporations. They were aware of the sluggish implementation of the Sullivan Principles, yet persistently leveraged corporate reforms to their advantage. Despite the relative weakness of corporate reform efforts, my dissertation shows the inventive ways that workers leveraged these reforms while fighting for local concessions. Workers and unionists did not always agree on the effectiveness of corporate codes, the necessity of working within the apartheid state, the role of Black workers in the trade union movement, or the significance of exile organizations, among many other points of contention. The racial makeup of the trade union, combined with its ideological and strategic orientation, dictated its approach. Thus, the movement did not always cohere, but the universal disdain for apartheid and the necessity of building international and local solidarity gave it dynamism.

In this sense, the Sullivan Principles became a contested framework. The code was at once both a symbol of reformist limitation and a surprising catalyst for worker creativity. South African labor leaders, community organizers, and international allies used the Principles’ language against the corporations themselves, measuring them by their own stated standards. Despite the myriad failures of the codes of conduct, the hope and possibility they engendered, as well as the multinational connections they rendered visible, inspired anti-apartheid worker internationalism and gave South African unions and workers an additional tool. In the South African context, the codes did lead to tangible change for workers, all the while giving the trade union movement something by which to measure and challenge corporate conduct. By the 1980s, U.S.-based trade unionists significantly bolstered the South African trade union movement and called upon U.S. companies to abide by the Sullivan code.

U.S.-based groups like the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists supported South African unionists in their efforts to establish a formidable presence at factories throughout the country. Trade unions such as the UAW lent institutional support to related unions in South Africa. The South African workplace also figured in international trade union federation conversations and strategy, including the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions’ anti-apartheid agenda. Organizations like the South African Congress of Trade Unions operated in exile, with a contingent in Britain, writing newsletters and supporting “front” unions in South Africa. Through such avenues, South African trade unionists traveled abroad and left lasting impressions on U.S.-based union leaders, revitalizing a labor movement otherwise in decline. These interactions blurred the boundary between domestic and foreign policy, revealing how workers shaped the political terrain of late Cold War capitalism.

“Diplomacy at Work” showcases how central transnational labor was to the decline of apartheid, including the ways the movement leveraged the Sullivan Principles to its advantage. The story of worker resistance and corporate reform unfolds as both a South African and an American drama, one in which the multinational factory became a stage for contesting and redefining the meaning of racial justice. “Diplomacy at Work” temporally spans from 1972 to 1987, with a conclusion that brings us up to the transition to majority rule in 1994. Instead of alternating between U.S. and South African-focused chapters, each chapter of the dissertation tells the U.S. and South African sides of the story together. This structure highlights the interwoven nature of corporate strategy and worker response. It also emphasizes that labor history cannot be disentangled from the broader history of U.S. business and diplomacy.

Although Black trade unions had long existed in South Africa, they were illegal. Responding to the banning of the SACTU federation, which had ties to the liberation movements, workers discreetly organized. Just as the trade union movement saw some growth, anti-apartheid leaders in the United States were turning their attention toward South Africa. These early shifts are chronicled in the first section of “Diplomacy at Work.” Titled “Policy Making,” this section tells the story of U.S.-South African affairs in the 1970s, tracing the origins of the South African trade union movement and the successive Cold War foreign policies of the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations. These sections situate the trade union movement within the broader context of the Cold War. Together, the chapters draw on Leon Sullivan’s papers at Emory University and the Library of Congress, as well as material from the Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter Presidential Libraries. Research in the National Archives and Records Administration also confirmed that the Sullivan Principles—and even South African workers—figured in U.S. policymaking circles.

Workers were not merely passive recipients of Washington and Pretoria’s reforms. While often critical of measures like the Wiehahn Commission and workplace codes, many workers took advantage of them, viewing them as an opening wedge.Footnote ²⁰ The middle section of the dissertation details this process of repurposing reforms. “Workers and the Shop-Floor,” which consists of chapters three through five, shifts the focus to the shop-floor in South Africa. Together, these chapters also uncover transnational solidarity networks connecting U.S. workers and activists with their South African counterparts. Worker stories appear throughout, often driving the narrative. Chapter four, an investigation of how the Sullivan Principles impacted workers at Ford and General Motors, contextualizes corporate audits by giving voice to the workers who only scarcely appear in written sources. Oral history interviews, conducted both via Zoom and in person, give readers a glimpse into the day-to-day experiences of workers and labor movement leadership. Archives such as the Mayibuye Archives at the University of the Western Cape, the Historical Papers at Wits University, and the Walter Reuther Library at Wayne State University contain rich labor and liberation movement collections, complementing the oral histories. Through these oral histories, “Diplomacy at Work” recovers the texture of working life under apartheid. It is through these granular stories that we can see how transnational politics took shape in everyday practice.

Although U.S. corporations tried to reform apartheid through the workplace, their efforts were often met with criticism from the liberation movements as well as the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. By the mid-1980s, economic sanctions legislation was being debated in Congress. The final section of the dissertation, titled “Reform Reconsidered,” details the unraveling of corporate reform and its replacement with more draconian economic sanctions. Corporations—regardless of how fully they implemented the Sullivan Principles or how closely they worked with emerging South African trade unions—were increasingly targets of divestment campaigns. After the passage of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act in 1986, companies often resolved to fully disinvest from South Africa. The conclusion reflects on the aftermath of the sanctions period, and takes us up to the 1994 transition to majority rule, marked by the election of Nelson Mandela as the country’s first Black president. Through a melding of diplomatic, business, and labor history, it becomes clear that workers both shaped and were shaped by diplomatic and corporate reforms. They also creatively repurposed U.S. power, in part through solidarity networks.

By tracing these overlapping stories of reform and resistance, the dissertation complicates familiar timelines of both the anti-apartheid struggle and global capitalism. Rather than viewing the 1970s and 1980s as an era of labor movement decline, “Diplomacy at Work” recasts these decades as a period of political imagination, when workers seized on corporate language to demand a more democratic economy. As this dissertation makes evident, the emergence of a powerful multiracial trade union movement had its roots in the shop-floor struggles of the 1970s. Instead of viewing this period as a time of regression, “Diplomacy at Work” showcases a multipronged movement that took advantage of weak policies as an imperfect though adaptable means to fight for workplace and community freedoms, and eventually set South Africa on a path to majority rule. While South African workers and trade unionists directed the action on the ground, transnational actors provided necessary support and solidarity from abroad.

Ultimately, “Diplomacy at Work” tells a nuanced story featuring many factions of the anti-apartheid movement, infusing the politics of the everyday and the lives of working people into narratives that have long centered on elites. Global worker-led coalitions were politically savvy, using a variety of strategies to fight for freedom on the shop-floor. Through quotidian tactics ranging from letter-writing campaigns, transnational product boycotts, and exchange programs, workers and unionists on both sides of the Atlantic carved their own spaces in the anti-apartheid movement.

The project thus bridges business history and the history of social movements. It demonstrates how codes of conduct, often dismissed as corporate window dressing, became unexpected tools for radical possibility. The Sullivan Principles may have originated in the boardroom, but workers reinterpreted their meaning on the shop-floor. In these everyday sites of negotiation, between managers, workers, and international allies, new forms of diplomacy were forged. In foregrounding South African workers as diplomats of a global economy, “Diplomacy at Work” invites historians of capitalism and international relations alike to rethink where power operated in the late twentieth century: not only in the halls of Washington or Pretoria, but in the vivid realities of factory life.