Lessons learnt to be put to test at gold sector’s wage talks

SOUTH Africa learned lessons from a record platinum-industry strike last year that would help prevent a similar stoppage during gold wage talks this year, Deputy Mineral Resources Minister Godfrey Oliphant said yesterday.

Pay talks between labour unions and companies including AngloGold Ashanti, the world’s third-largest producer, are set to begin next month. Last year, about 70 000 workers at the local operations of the three biggest global platinum firms led a five-month stoppage that crippled output of the metal and contributed to the slowest pace of South African economic expansion since a 2009 recession.

A strike was “not likely” this year, Oliphant said. “Both for industry and labour, it was a hard lesson of that long strike of five months.”

The platinum stoppage was led by the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu), which had displaced the National Union of Mineworkers as the biggest employee representative in the industry.

Amcu represents 25 percent of gold employees, according to the Chamber of Mines. It holds the majority of membership at the biggest mines operated by AngloGold, Sibanye and Harmony.

The gold industry uses a collective bargaining system in which producers, through the Chamber of Mines lobby group, negotiate with unions to reach agreements that apply across most pay grades at companies that are signatories to the accord.

This differs from the platinum industry, where company-specific pacts are reached.

While labour laws were able to deal with collective bargaining, they