Shabangu blames Implats for spreading strikes
IMPALA Platinum (Implats) management’s “grave error” is to blame for the wave of strikes in the mining sector, says Mineral Resources Minister Susan Shabangu, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM).
Implats, the world’s second-largest platinum producer, has increased its workers’ pay twice since an illegal strike that ended in February. Wage strikes have subsequently spread to Anglo American Platinum, the largest platinum producer, and Gold Fields, Samancor, Coal of Africa, Village Main Reef and other miners. Demands are rising, with workers at a Northern Cape mine demanding R21,500 a month.
There may be a 355,000oz platinum deficit this year, compared with a 112,000oz shortfall estimated earlier, SBG Securities analysts said yesterday. SA may produce 4.1-million ounces this year, “the lowest level of primary platinum production from SA this millennium”, they said.
The NUM and Cosatu said at a press briefing yesterday that Implats had made a “grave error” in granting an 18% wage increase to one section of the workforce. “It is the mine employers in general, and Impala bosses in particular, who must take full responsibility for all the strikes that are spreading in the mining industry,” they said.
Ms Shabangu also singled out Implats as the trigger for the strikes that
have cost SA hundreds of millions of rand in lost production.
“Are they not responsible for what we are seeing today? They’ve proved a point that, even if you have wage agreements, you can still undermine them,” she said. “You can’t agree on a process and then immediately move out of that process. That is why we have this challenge now.
“We have to look at the conduct of some mining companies like Implats who are responsible for being unilateral and under- mining some of their processes.”
Implats said yesterday the prevailing tensions in the mining sector are “extremely complex and multifaceted”.
“The Farlam commission, and other potential inquiries and investigations, will play an important role in examining all the factors which might have led to the current situation,” Implats said.
“Our long-term strategy remains to establish a new multiunion industrial relations dispensation in our operations while moving towards a centralised wage engagement process for the platinum mining industry.”
Ms Shabangu yesterday urged platinum miners to engage in a centralised wage bargaining process to prevent unions from negotiating with individual companies and exploiting their divisions.
Controversially, she said gold and coal companies should accede to the NUM’s demands to reopen wage talks ahead of negotiations next year.
“Rome is burning now and those talks need to be reopened and they’ve got to be openminded. The process won’t only be about wages, it will be to revisit the structure itself to see if the processes are sufficient and how to avoid what we are seeing,” Ms Shabangu said.
Chamber of Mines spokesman Vusi Mabena said revisiting the two-year wage agreement now would render such agreements valueless in the future.
The NUM is meeting the chamber today to “get negotiations going” in the gold and coal sectors and to discuss Cosatu’s proposal that a commission of inquiry be established to examine the employment and social conditions of mineworkers.