Mine bosses to blame for wildcat strikes, says Vavi

COSATU has blamed mine employers for the wildcat strikes in the industry.

“The people who must shoulder all the blame for these wildcat strikes are the mine bosses,” the labour federation’s general secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi, said in Joburg yesterday.

Mineworkers continued to strike at AngloGold Ashanti, Gold Field’s KDC West and Beatrix mines and at Samancor Chrome Western Mine.

Yesterday, Anglo American Platinum (Amplats) said it had started taking disciplinary action against the illegal strikers there.

Vavi said while the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) did not support unprotected industrial action, “the source of all these upheavals is the pathetic levels of pay and working conditions mineworkers are subjected to”.

Wage negotiations conducted by unions had been jeopardised by mining employers who deviated from the norm.

“The collective bargaining system is under threat, not because of the National Union of Mineworkers, but because the employers miscalculated.”

Vavi said the platinum mine bosses should be blamed for strikes at the beginning of the year as they had offered an 18 percent increase to only one category of worker. This had raised expectations among all workers.

This led to a violent strike among rock drillers, in which workers refused to negotiate through NUM.

There have since been wildcat strikes at mines across the country.

Meanwhile, workers at Petra Diamonds downed tools yesterday and staged a sit-in underground at two of the company’s Kimberley.

Petra Diamonds’ group support manager, Egbert Klapwijk, confirmed yesterday that workers on the morning shift at the Joint Shafts and Wesselton mines had stopped work.

He said that, for safety reasons, the mine management had stopped the workers from the afternoon shift going underground.

He confirmed that they were communicating with the leadership of the NUM to convince workers to go back to work, but refused to divulge details of the negotiations.

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The miners above ground at the two shafts told the Diamond Fields Advertiser more than 50 employees at each of the two shafts were underground. When reporters arrived at Joint Shafts yesterday afternoon, there was a huge police presence.

“The workers are demanding that general workers be paid a basic salary of R10 000, and they want machine operators to be paid R17 000 [and] workers at supervisory level to be paid a basic salary of R21 000,” NUM’s regional organiser, Orapeleng Moraladi, said.