Instead of adopting the International Labour Organization (ILO)�s Decent Work agenda, Africa�s unions should learn from past successes and failings and promote change from below. While the Decent Work agenda has some positive elements that unions could appropriate, its faith in state-based social protection and advocacy of social corporatism (or �tripartism�) assumes that states can serve as guardians of the popular classes. This fails to consider how state welfare systems, electoral politics and all forms of corporatism profoundly damage working-class movements. Real changes must be driven by a class-based movement of self-activity that mobilises from below to replace the current system with common ownership, popular self-management and bottom-up planning.