Labour recruiter looks at farming
TEBA, which recruits workers for SA’s mines, might branch into agriculture, taking advantage of its experience in dealing with migrant labour, CEO Graham Herbert said.
TEBA, the company intimately involved in labour on SA’s gold and platinum mines, might branch into agriculture, taking advantage of its experience in dealing with migrant labour, CEO Graham Herbert says.
Teba recruits mineworkers from SA and neighbouring states to work on the gold and platinum mines.
Dr Herbert said in an interview last week that Teba wanted to expand its services into the burgeoning iron ore and manganese mines in the Northern Cape. A logical industry for Teba to target would be agriculture, given its reliance on migrant labour, much like mining.
There has been a dramatic decline in the both the number of mineworkers Teba provides services to annually, having fallen to 305,000 a year from 500,000 a decade ago.
From a 60:40 ratio of foreign to domestic workers on Teba’s books, the split is now 60:40 in favour of locals and widening steadily because the Immigration Act bars the entry of unskilled workers into SA.
The pool of skilled foreign miners has been shrinking annually by about 8% a year for the past five years.
“In 10 years there will be an insignificant number of mineworkers from Mozambique and Lesotho, which are the big areas, sending about 30,000 workers each,” Dr Herbert said.
Within the local component, 80% used to be drawn from areas far from mining regions in Gauteng, North West, Free State and Limpopo. That too has changed from a decade ago and now 80% of mining labour is drawn from people claiming to live in communities near mines as companies increasingly employ locals.
Teba is not a labour broking firm because it does not employ miners and contract out their services. It helps find people jobs on mines, assessing suitability and verifying their qualifications.
It has development and socioeconomic programmes in laboursending areas. These include feeding schemes and home-based care for about 1,800 sick workers sent home from the mines.
Teba further plays a role tracing individuals and assisting them with complex paperwork to claim pensions, provident funds and benefits dating back decades. “Billions of rands are owing to a large backlog of people, poor people in rural areas, where Teba finds it easy to find people,” Dr Herbert said.
These were people who could not be tracked by agencies using government records. Pension and provident fund administrators used these agencies because they were cheaper than Teba.
“Administrators have to get over the cost issue,” Dr Herbert said. “That’s not a sound argument.”
He cited a case where 45,000 miners with lung diseases were awaiting a benefit payment pending the collection of a single document.
Since its founding in 1902, Teba has built up extensive networks within rural areas and it uses this to find families of injured or killed miners at the behest of mining companies seeking beneficiaries of benefits or pension payments.
Lonmin executive vice-president of human capital Barnard Mokwena said last month that the company planned to shift away from a 90% migrant workforce, sourcing labour from areas around its mines near Rustenburg. It had taken on its own worker recruitment instead of outsourcing the function to Teba.
Dr Herbert said this was unlikely to be the start of a trend and Teba would continue to be an important player because it had systems, verification processes and databases that individual mining companies did not have.
Harmony Gold CEO Graham Briggs said Teba played a critical role in the miner’s workforce and provided a service not easily replicated by any other company. “They have a vast amount of information about workers and their families.
“In labour-sending areas, they are the only way of communicating with people.”
Teba is 75%-owned by a black empowerment consortium headed by James Motlatsi, the former president of the National Union of Mineworkers. Its 600 employees hold a 25% share.
The intention was that mining companies would channel a portion of their social spending through Teba and its extensive rural networks, but this did not happen. “Companies must believe they can do it better by themselves,” Dr Herbert said. “They can’t do it cheaper than we can because they have to go out into these areas and establish the links. There’s been a long history of money wasted in the industry that we believe doesn’t have to be wasted in the future if it’s channelled through an organisation with a presence and well-established processes and (that) understands rural needs.”
Dr Herbert said Teba’s research had shown that there was a need for a co-ordinating role the company could play in labour-sending communities and those around mining operations. There were gross inefficiencies because of a lack of communication between companies on social projects in labour-sending areas, leading to duplication.