Retrenchment tremors shake a mining village
COLLECTING old bottles, plastic and cardboard with his family of four at a dump site near Chaneng village in Rustenburg, Charles Nthete has been making a living foraging for recyclable material for the past three weeks.
“I am unemployed now. The company I worked for retrenched me and 37 others. They told us that the value of the product [chrome] we produce has gone down quite significantly. So I thought I should work like this to avoid being without an income,” he said.
Nthete worked for chrome mining company African Sun, which is now under care and maintenance with only nine workers on site.
His experience of joblessness is mirrored in almost every person you meet on the streets or loitering at home in the village, near Styldrift platinum mine.
Mining companies have implement massive jobs cuts as commodity prices have tumbled.
Platinum prices have dropped 50% in five years, to $883 (about R14 200) this week from $1 764 in 2011.
In those five years, platinum’s sister commodity palladium has fallen 39% to $497.93 from $850.38 per ounce.
After a consultation process, Lonmin will have cut 5 000 jobs by the end of January.
Nthete was not the only person trying to find a way of making a living in the area.
Many have built rooms in their back yards to accommodate miners who come from Mozambique, Lesotho, KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape to work on surrounding mines.
Others could not afford to build rooms in their back yards and have simply opened their houses to workers. The average rent charged is between R300 and R600 per month, depending on the size of the room and the services and amenities offered.
Khuma Mosidi, a 57-year-old retired miner, has built four rooms in his back yard, accommodating not only miners but their families as well; he offers space for a miner, his wife, and a maximum of two children.
He said villagers had negotiated with Impala Platinum for cows to have access to water — but this was stopped by the Royal Bafokeng Nation, which said people should go to the traditional authority for permission to make deals with any other mine in the area.
“They stopped the process saying that they own the land and that we should go to them to make an agreement because they were the one with shares with Impala,” Mosidi said.
Mosidi, who worked as a miner for 33 years, said there had been no new infrastructure development in the area.
Pule Tshukudu, 50, who used to work at Royal Bafokeng Platinum’s Rasimone mine shaft, said he had been there for 10 years and before that had been with Impala Platinum.
“We are poor and some people cannot even afford the residential areas they are renting,” he said.
He added that no one was allowed to wear a “green” T-shirt — held to denote support for the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union — and the choice of which union miners should join was made for them.
At the dump, Nthete said that with talk of retrenchments at every mine in the area, “I am convinced recycling is the only way to put food on the table for us”.