By Michael Schmidt
Few people will have heard the name of the widow sitting on the grass at the roadside next to a weed-ridden parking lot near Alexandra township - and yet overnight she has become one of the most powerful women in the country.
Dressed in her sensible sandals and a blouse, Mary Malete (66) looks matronly - a reflection of her life spent working as a nursing sister.
But last Friday, the woman known to her colleagues as Ma Mary was elected president of the potent new South African Confederation of Trade Unions (Sacotu).
Even so, few people outside the labour union movement would recognise the woman who started nursing in 1961 and earned R14 a month.
Yet now the Joburg mother-of-one is able to marshal up to 890 000 trade union members behind her - making her a more formidable female figure than Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, whose ruling ANC has only 621 000 paid-up members.
But Malete has some firm, if not contrary, ideas on gender. While she admitted she was aware of her new-found power, she stated emphatically: "I am not a woman president, I am a worker president - and I still work as a nurse."
The new union was born from the unlikely marriage of the formerly white-skinned and white-collared Federation of Unions of SA (Fedusa) and the former Pan Africanist Congress-linked and blue-collared National Council of Trade Unions (Nactu), making Sacotu one of the largest membership-based organisations in the country.
Sometime rival, the ANC-allied Congress of SA Trade Unions - whose deputy general secretary Bheki Ntshalintshali addressed Sacotu's founding congress last Friday - has 1,8-million members.
But, said Malete, affiliates tended to sneakily underestimate their membership in order to lower the dues they owed to head office. A proper audit would soon determine the correct number, but she said she believed it would be close to a million.
"Many people never believed Fedusa and Nactu would merge," she told me.
"There was this idea Nactu members were PAC supporters, while Fedusa's members were from the National Party and were white-collar workers who were not fighting to defend the working class."
Sacotu is deliberately non-party affiliated - but this stance, Malete conceded, did not mean it was apolitical. "We don't live in a cocoon," she said.
Still, although the desire for a single national labour federation is close to the hearts of both Malete and Cosatu's Zwelinzima Vavi, Cosatu's party ties remain a stumbling block.
But the remarkable labour unity displayed by Nactu, Fedusa, Cosatu and the independents during June's fierce public sector strike showed, Ma Mary believes, that in the not-too-distant future, bread-and-butter concerns will finally overcome political affection - and a new non-partisan labour giant will emerge.