Emma Tiny Mashinini (1929 –2017) was a South African trade unionist and political leader. Born and raised in Johannesburg, she experienced the discrimination and violence of the Apartheid system. As a result, she dedicated her professional life to fighting against its various, overlapping forms of inequality and injustice. Among these, in her childhood, she lived through forced removals that were meant to entrench the policy of separate development, labour inequalities and job reservation, racism as well as gender discrimination. Having worked from the age of 14 and then raising a family, she became a union organiser and was the founding General Secretary of the Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers Union of South Africa (CCAWUSA) in 1975.

She was an Honorary Life President of SACCAWU. In this role, she was one of the stalwarts to initiate the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) in 1985 on whose legacy she left a permanent imprint. She was also the chairperson of the Mediation and Conciliation Centre.

Her political activism led to her persecution and arrest, during which time she was detained in solitary confinement for 6 months without charges in 1981–82, under Section 6 of the 1967 Terrorism Act.

As a devout Anglican, she worked for the South African Council of Churches (SACC) in the Justice and Reconciliation Department during a period in which the church belonged to one of the most vibrant parts of South African civil society. After the country’s transition to democracy in 1994, she re-emerged from a brief period of retirement and served in various capacities under the newly-instated South African government.

She was a Commissioner for the Restitution of Land Rights and continued her activism through participation in various structures including, among others, the African branch of the international labour federation, FIET (now Uni Global Union), the National Manpower Commission, Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution (CASAC) and Corruption Watch, from which she later retired.

She served as a committee member of the J and J Group Trust for several years. She participated in women’s organisations and activities, and was an active member of the Anglican church, as well as the Mother’s Union.

As an outspoken critic, she authored various publications, including her autobiography “Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life”, which was first published by the Women’s Press (London), in 1989 and 1990 and had been banned by the government, later unbanned and republished in South Africa in 2012. She was conferred with an Honorary Doctorate in Literature and Philosophy by the University of South Africa, was awarded the National Order of Luthuli and was bestowed with the Order of Simon of Cyrene, which is the highest award given by the Anglican Church of Southern Africa to laity in recognition of her dedication to the eradication of social injustice she was a recipient of many other local and international awards.