The South African workforce is characterised by racial, gender, occupational and sectoral unevenness in the distribution of skills, employment and training opportunities. This article considers how enterprise training in South Africa contributes to ameliorating, sustaining or exacerbating such inequalities. Using data from the National Skills Survey of 2003, it explains these features with reference to a tension between the distorted apartheid training legacy and the inherent unevenness of training-related policy implementation after 1994. Unevenness will be a feature of any national workplace training environment and is not necessarily a sign of dysfunction. In South Africa, unevenness in the pattern of access to training opportunities may reflect legitimate treatment of workers who were previously disadvantaged. (Contains 10 tables and 1 note.)