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.