Trade unions played an important role in South Africa’s transition from apartheid in 1994 and continue to play a very public role in the South African economy. Trade unions are found to have had an increasingly positive effect on members’ wages, although it appears that this increase has resulted in part from changes in the composition of union membership. Unions also had an inequality-reducing character, with union premiums for workers at the lower end of the wage distribution being greater than those for workers at the higher end of the wage distribution.