Upheaval: Disrupted Lives in Journalism

In South Africa, there was active unionisation of media workers in general, and journalists in particular, in the 1980s and 1990s, but thereafter, this disintegrated, as shown in Daniels’ (2020) book, Power and Loss in South African Journalism: News in the Age of Social Media (hereafter Power and Loss). One of the more noteworthy findings in South Africa was that 72% of the 158 journalists who participated in the research for Power and Loss said they had no union and journalist association support during their retrenchment process, while the majority of over 90%, said there was no employer funded career support either.