Mines automation ‘easily done’

Mines can replace people with automation far more easily than the labour unions believe, but there is no substitute for such jobs in the jobs market, former Harmony CEO Bernard Swanepoel said on Wednesday.

Mines can replace people with automation far more easily than the labour unions believe, but there is no substitute for such jobs in the jobs market, director of consultancy To The Point and former Harmony CEO Bernard Swanepoel said on Wednesday.

Between 2012 and 2015, SA’s mining sector shed 60,000 jobs. Last week, AngloGold Ashanti warned it was considering retrenching 850 people.

Swanepoel said at a Deloitte panel discussion on Africa in 2017 that to unskilled and unemployed people, jobs in mining were relatively more attractive than in any other sector. Mining companies paid double the minimum wage and provided a career path.

Peter Major, head of mining at Cadiz Corporate Solutions, said if the government wanted to grow mining jobs, it had to put supportive policies in place. About 2,000 pieces of legislation were enacted in the past 30 years without considering their implications. In the same period, SA’s gold output declined and 470,000 mining jobs were lost.

Speakers disagreed whether policies or prices were the more important factor in attracting mining investments.

The JSE’s director of commodity derivatives, Chris Sturgess, said if the government did not support a particular sector, or was unwilling to make policy changes, it was difficult to sell that sector to investors.