Callous bosses must wake up to the anger of workers

THE hypocrisy of the corporate elite was on display this week as the CEO of one of South Africa’s blue-chip platinum companies defended his multimillion-rand pay packet as being no more than what he was worth. Chris Griffith, head of Anglo American Platinum (Amplats), one of the three companies affected by the strikes across the platinum belt, reacted angrily to criticism of the company’s decision last week to award R76.4 -million in bonuses to 12 executives.

“Must I run this company and deal with all this nonsense for nothing? I’m at work, I’m not on strike. I’m not demanding to be paid what I’m not worth,” he said.

It might have been an intemperate reaction, but Griffith’s views reflect what many silver-spooned executives secretly feel — although they are usually too tactful to openly say so.

Still, it was a startling admission — not least for the fact that it showed alarming insensitivity on the part of one of the corporate leaders involved in the war over a R12 500 minimum wage on the platinum belt.

And make no mistake, this is a war. This week alone, there were four deaths, including a 60-year-old man who was knifed on the way to work at Lonmin’s Saffy shaft on Monday. The level of anger is not something that is easy to fathom from a Sandton executive suite.

And yet Lonmin, the company whose lamentable handling of Marikana means that a shadow will always hang over it, has told miners to return to work. Many of them, torn between hunger and fear, have done so.

Griffith’s comments provoked a predictable backlash. This is why he told this newspaper on Friday that he wanted to “apologise to the employees” of Amplats, saying his choice of words was “inappropriate and a poor way to describe the extremely challenging situation we find ourselves in”.

“I care deeply about the impact of this strike on the lives of our employees, their families and communities. The situation is dire. However, Amcu’s demand for a minimum basic wage of R12 500 remains unaffordable as it would increase our costs by approximately R4.5-billion per year.”

Griffith has been rightly castigated for his lack of sensitivity in dealing with this crisis, but he was not entirely wrong in his analysis.

We live in a market-driven economy in which people are free to work for the wage they are offered; if they think it is exploitative, they can look elsewhere.

But this is not a normal market, moulded and shaped by supply and demand. Rather, it is skewed by the scandal that is South Africa’s unemployment rate and seasoned with the legacy of how mines determined wages for more than a century.

In any society crushed by an unemployment rate that, even by the narrowest definition, amounts to a quarter of the workforce, people without skills will work for whatever they can get.

This is hardly the type of free market in which the skills on offer are folded seamlessly into whatever jobs are on offer. Rather, it is a market in which workers, fed up with listening to lectures about market economics, have been repeatedly short-changed.

In his apology, Griffith said that although it might not be fair, this was just how the labour market worked. What he does not seem to sense is that just as Marikana woke the beast in 2012, the current unrest has echoes of the Arab Spring. The stew of joblessness, anger, government delinquency and artificial union strength means the issues are far broader than just the mega-million pay cheques awarded to executives.

It will not work to merely haul out the usual clichés.