COSATU poster advertising a miners' strike
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) is a labor union federation in South Africa that was founded on 1 December 1985. It became the largest of the three labor union federations of South Africa, with twenty-one affiliated unions and 1,800,000 workers. COSATU took part in the fight against apartheid, and the organization grew very powerful; it allied with the African National Congress and South African Communist Party, although it criticized Jacob Zuma's government several times. The group expelled NUMSA, a Marxist-Leninist union, in November 2014 due to violating the COSATU constitution, so seven other labor unions also decided to leave the union in protest.