[miningmx] — THE Farlam Commission still has to unearth what really happened at
Marikana, but what is already certain is that the standoff and subsequent massacre
on August 16 will change South Africa’s labour scene forever.
The clearest indication of this is the announcement this weekend by Mineral
Resources Minister Susan Shabangu that gold and platinum mines will have central
bargaining structures going forward.
This is a much more far-reaching step than what it seems at face value. It will also
take quite some time to establish such a forum – two years if the matter is urgently
attended to.
We could first see an interim forum, but the end result is already clear: wage
negotiations, which have for years been conducted at company level in the platinum
sector, will in future be centrally negotiated. This will probably be done along with
the wage negotiations for the gold mines, because the work and job requirements
are virtually identical.
In theory this should result in the inequality of wages – differences between the
wages of workers who do the same job and are equally productive – being
eliminated. Employers (platinum mines and contractors for platinum mines) will
theoretically no longer be able to compete with one other on the basis of wages.
The playing off of workers against one another was a major factor in the events that
culminated in the Marikana massacre. The basic wage of R10,500 per month now
being mentioned versus the claims of rock-drill operators, who complain that they
only take home R4,500 for their hard and dangerous work, is the difference between
a full-time employee at one of the platinum producers and wages paid by
contractors.
In the 1990s, when a new macro-economic policy was being debated following the
country’s political liberation, the Free Market Foundation suggested the creation of a
two-tier labour system. It would consist of a regulated labour dispensation as we
know it today and a second, unregulated level for new and emerging companies, in
which workers would have no protection.
That was fuel to the fire of the new government, because at that time former Labour
Minister Tito Mboweni had just published a green paper on labour market policy
which promised labour rights to all workers who didn’t enjoy those previously.
The Foundation’s proposal was made with a rather superior attitude and received
with equal disdain. However, if one reads these documents today, you’ll be amazed
at the accuracy of the predictions if the two-tier system was not introduced.
Unemployment was 32.7% at the time, and the Foundation predicted that within
eight years, by 2004, it would be more than 40%.
Still, the prospect of making money did not stop entrepreneurs from creating their
own second-level labour market. It has different names, such as subcontractors or
outsourcing, but it has one common feature – there is no conventional service
contract and those who work in it have little or no job security.
Statistics on the platinum industry by the Department of Mineral Resources show
that about 134,000 people work at platinum mines in the Rustenburg area. They
earn an average of R15,300 per month.
However, there are also 66,394 contract workers at the same platinum mines. Their
average wage is R9,600 per month. In other words, just about a third of the
workforce in the platinum mines consists of contract workers who earn almost 60%
less than permanent, protected employees.
Contract workers are probably mostly employees on the lower job levels, but there
are also permanent employees at the lower job levels, such as rock-drill operators
and other underground machine operators. And remember too that permanent
employees are almost always eligible for production bonuses, while contract workers
usually just get a basic wage.
That’s a recipe for labour conflict if ever there was one.
Academics have been warning Cosatu for years that it must reform itself and make
provision for such atypical workers, since they are becoming an increasingly larger
portion of the overall labour market. The atypical, unconventional working
relationship is now a worldwide phenomenon that can no longer be stopped.
The trade unions’ survival depends on the answer they can offer to this, the
academics say. The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) is today experiencing this
problem to a far greater extent than any academic would have predicted in the past
decade.
Behind the scenes, this has been a fiercely contested issue with fanatical ideological
viewpoints between intellectual leftists and trade union office-bearers. Instead of
heeding the academics, Cosatu has devoted its energy in the past five years to
“banning’ what it calls labour broking. It could afford to do so because its growth
among workers in the public service masked problems elsewhere.
It almost succeeded in banning labour broking, but some roleplayers say that the
legislative amendments on this issue will probably result in more employers turning
to unconventional employment relationships. That’s what happens if you try to fight
the wind.
It’s a pity the Foundation and the government did not do more to convince one
another of their views at the time. Perhaps they could have done so if the proposals
had been more moderate, such as guaranteeing fundamental rights for workers in
the second, lower labour market.
Dr Andries (Roof) Bezuidenhout, industrial sociologist at the University of Pretoria,
recently determined on the basis of the regional development plans in the North-
West that 255,456 men and 194,319 women live in the Rustenburg district. That’s
the demographics of migrant labour.
Among those who live in Rustenburg, 45% live in formal housing – houses and flats
– and 42% in informal housing, in other words zinc shacks. There are 38 informal
settlements or squatter camps in the area. These are statistics that clearly illustrate
enormous poverty. That’s the situation in an area that contains 70% of the world’s
platinum group metals, the most valuable mineral resources on the planet.
– Sake24
