Labour wants a greater say in the decisions made on the mines, report Karen Harverson and Vuyo Mvoko
No one is arguing with Anglo American Corporation’s call last week that cost and productivity changes are needed at Free State Consolidated Gold mines (Freegold) to avoid the threatened closure of five of its shafts and the loss of 10 000 jobs.
But chief executive of Anglo’s gold and uranium division Bobby Godsell’s plea for “more shifts, more blasts and more gold” at Freegold — which reported a R5,1-million loss in the December quarter ended 1995 — must be seen in the context of long-standing demands by workers to review the entire mining
Laments Samson Machidi, National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) regional co-ordinator in the Free State: “Decisions are being made without our involvement and with no access to information, geological or otherwise.
“If costs need cutting, what about the top- heavy and inefficient levels of management. Why must it always be black workers in the lower grades who lose their jobs? We have a right to a say in the future of these mines and how they are run.”
And the government agrees. Labour Minister Tito Mboweni has said: “Both the government and the unions should not be caught by surprise when these things have to happen. These are major restructurings.”
NUM assistant general secretary Gwede Mantashe says the profitability of mining operations stretches beyond increasing the output of workers. “It should also include flattening management structures, issues such as double blasting, single panel supervision and numerous others. You can’t just address the issue of productivity ad hoc. There is a need for a major surgical overhaul of the industry which management has been avoiding.
“Randgold, by breaking the management structure, took a number of loss-making marginal shafts, and made them profitable,” says Mantashe. He questions why the same can’t be done for all five loss-making shafts, two of which still have considerable reserves.
“You also need to analyse how much money flowed from the shafts, particularly Saaiplaas, to finance headoffice before saying that that shaft was unprofitable,” he argues.
He welcomes the summit meeting called by Anglo this week (Thursday) for workers and management to thrash out how to save Freegold’s shafts from closure, but questions why it is only called now when the NUM called for problems in the mining industry to be discussed last year.
“They [Anglo] wait for a bad result and then hold the threat of job losses over our head like a gun and say agree to our solution to restore profitability or we pull the trigger,” says Mantashe.
Anglo’s long-time call for full calendar operations (Fulco) could have been implemented five months ago, says Mantashe, but management wanted to avoid sitting down with workers to determine the destiny of the industry as a whole. “Instead they wanted to make special arrangements with individual mines which wasn’t acceptable.”
The NUM has stopped saying no to retrenchments since 1989 and instead, has been calling for a better management of the process. Accepting that all mines have a certain life span, the union has since been calling for forward planning as well as a “social plan” that they hope would cushion retrenched workers.
Mantashe believes the retrenchment announced by Anglo is part of a bigger plot by big business to usurp the support base of the ANC- led government.
“The government is relying on the business sector to create jobs while it restructures the public sector but instead all we’ve seen over the past year are job losses in the private sector.”
Employment in the mining industry reached its peak in 1987, but a third of that workforce has since lost their jobs, says NUM.
This week 3 000 workers at Harmony opted for retirement packages in the face of an insecure future. The mine’s managing director Bernard Swanepoel hailed the move as a “constructive
When 5 500 workers were to be retrenched from Buffelsfontein mine in Klerksdorp three weeks ago, even the 2 000 who were going to be rehired demanded their packages.
“We need commitment from Anglo American that they will do everything possible to protect jobs,” Mboweni said after his meeting with Godsell this week.
Not that there have never been discussions before between the workers’ representatives and management.
Among other things, management has proposed that there be low basic wage increases and a full calendar production cycle which will include weekends and public holidays.
“We’ve been very explicit,” Anglo American public affairs manager, James Duncan said before Thursday’s meeting with worker representatives in Welkom.
He said productivity, costs incurred, and the gold price were the main problems facing Freegold at present.
Costs containment programmes, he said, worked to some extent, but the mines now need to look further because inflation has caught up with them. While hedging activities have given “a window of opportunity”, the gold price remains largely a function of factors beyond the control of the South African gold producing industry, he said.
But who’s not productive and why? Duncan failed to provide a more direct answer. He said, however, that the mines are not making the necessary advances to produce gold at a profit, and “it is no longer tenable for the shareholders to bear the consequences”.
So should it be the workers who bear the consequences? What of the allegation of “serious mismanagement” which NUM general secretary Kgalema Motlanthe says is
“We’ve got to rise above blame and recrimination, it’s an absolute psychosis in this country. We are interested in solutions.” Duncan said.
Solutions have to be more long-term than “mere dog fights,” as Mboweni put it. “We need an interactive approach with mechanisms which provide for joint decision-making, consultation, and information-gathering and –
“From a jobs point of view, the mining industry needs to come to the Cabinet and say ‘this is where we are today, what the trends are showing, and this is where we are likely to be in the year 2 000’.”
Why then, was the government not part of Thursday’s solution-seeking meeting between the two parties?
“It would be wrong for the government to say labour or Anglo do this, at this stage. The best thing is to let the parties sort it out. When they notice that you are in favour of one or the other party, they’ll use you to angle for advantage. You’ll add weight on a particular side,” says Mboweni
He is proposing an inter-ministerial summit which will include trade and industry, finance, mineral and energy affairs, and Deputy President Thabo Mbeki’s office.
The summit will look at the relationships between the ministries and how they can all ensure singularity of purpose regarding the creation and preservation of jobs.
Mboweni is setting up a unit that will do continuous research and will advise on a whole range of labour market issues “to make sure policy-making, which is a dynamic process, has a place within the department of labour”.