[miningmx.com] – South Africa’s gold industry teetered on widescale strike activity after nearly two months of wage talks broke down at midday today – a development that also has gold producers pondering pre-emptive lock-out action that would see up to 140,000 employees barred from work.
“This is it. This is our final offer. We have gone through a 30-day process [of arbitration] and we’ve got to a point where there is no resolution,’ said Graham Briggs, CEO of Harmony Gold, one of the companies represented by the Chamber of Mines in wage talks.
The chamber – which is also acting for Sibanye Gold and AngloGold Ashanti among others – increased its basic wage offer to 6.5% on August 27 for entry-level workers and 6% for other categories as well as pitching a profit share system it calls “gain share’.
The offers were rejected “out of hand’ while gain share was not considered, said Briggs at a media conference today.
There is speculation that the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) is to call a strike from tomorrow (August 30) although Briggs said the companies had not received a strike notice as yet. Equally uncertain is the prospect of companies enforcing their own lock-out, effectively a reverse of a strike, barring employees from attending the mines and not paying them while they were closed.
Elize Strydom, chief negotiator for the Chamber of Mines, said there was provision in the Labour Relations Act (LRA) for a lock out, although it had never been widely implemented, in which employees would be given 48 hours notification of the lock-out.
Commenting on the wage talks, Strydom said the discussions had been unlike any other in which she’d been involved. “This is the first time I have experienced this. In my view, this is not negotiation,’ she said.
“It might be an issue of inter-union rivalry. If one of them blinks where does it leave the other one,’ Strydom said.
The NUM had issued demands for a 60% increase in entry-level wages while its rival, the Association of Mineworkers & Construction Union (AMCU), which has about 17% of gold industry workers in its ranks, had asked for a 120% increase. There had been no adjustment from the unions except from Solidarity which had, however, rejected the profit share idea that Briggs said could add up to 3% to basic salaries.
Commenting on the prospect of a lock-out, Briggs said it would be decided by the companies individually, and carefully judged. “Our preference is not to lose a day because the industry cannot afford it, and the country can’t afford it.’
“The preference is that we don’t go this route and we would invite to the union bosses to sit down together to try understand where we are,’ said Briggs who added that the current stand-off could be changed with a telephone call from unions.
“We can pursue this lockout thing from several phases, but it is a drastic step,’ said Briggs. “It hasn’t been used, certainly not in the recent history. A lockout or a strike on its own is not going to resume the problem,’ he said.
“I’m not going to comment on the prospect of a lockout as there is a strategic advantage from having it which not going to disclose,’ he said.
Said Mike O’Hare, operations director for AngloGold Ashanti South African mines: “We still see that don’t have to end up in a deadlock situation. There are still avenues. We will carefully consider the move of a lockout’.
Neal Froneman, CEO of Sibanye Gold, said he felt the strike, if there was one, would be short-lived. “I’ve always said there is no appetite for it. And it’s always the workers that suffer the most,’ he said.
He said earlier this month that Sibanye Gold had enough cash reserves to see through a prolonged strike at the company’s operations which were in the west Rand and southern Free State.
