“Hunting dogs are sent into the veld by their owners to catch animals. When the dogs have caught them, the owners eat all the meat and then throw the dogs the bones. The only difference between hunting dogs and mineworkers is that we are sent underground to catch gold,” says Sibongiseni Zweni, a mineworker on AngloGold’s Savuka mine in Carletonville.
He is talking about the stalemate over the wage negotiations between the Chamber of Mines and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), which ended at the eleventh hour last Sunday.
“A happy day,” says Zweni. “But a kakky process.”
Zweni is a veteran of the Great Miners’ Strike in 1987. He remembers his participation as “21 days of victimisation, violence, intimidation and dismissal”.
“Yes, we avoided a strike last Sunday. But we cannot fold our arms and say the struggle of the mineworkers is over yet.”
His ambiguous feelings about the settlement stem from experience, something he lacked in 1987.
“The [1987 strike] was a setback rather than a victory,” he says.
“This time the opposite is true, and we are happy.”
But the reality, Zweni says, is that the bigwigs are still being paid much more than the mineworkers at the coalface.
A more cosmetic reason for his guardedness about the settlement was the protracted nature of the talks. Zweni says the negotiations could have been concluded with less brinkmanship because earlier pro-testations by the chamber that wage increases beyond 9,5% would break their back, proved “untrue”.
The 1987 mining strike, which at its height saw about 300 000 miners on the streets, ended in a fiasco when 50 000 were dismissed.
None of the mineworkers was granted a wage increase. The NUM was nearly destroyed and took two years to rebuild its membership to pre-1987 levels.
“We misjudged the power of the chamber,” says Zweni.
“But the strike also proved the strength of the people and gave us a taste of the power of control.”
Retrospectively, Zweni says, too much was at stake.
“We were demanding a 30% increase and the chamber was offering 27%. We should have accepted this offer. Mine owners cannot always give us the percentage increase that we want because they are also acting under certain controls.”
He describes Sunday’s settlement, which averted a strike by 100 000 miners, as “reasonable”, but says that putting the agreement into practice still hangs in the balance.
The issues he and his colleagues were not prepared to compromise on — and on which the strike hinged — were a 10% wage increase and job grading.
“We were going to strike, even over 0,25%,” says Zweni. “The nature of negotiations is to meet the other party halfway. By offering 9,5% the chamber was asking us to compromise even more.”
The NUM’s original demand was a 20% increase.
Hand in hand with this, Zweni says, is the need for certain jobs to be slotted in at higher grades to narrow the gap between higher and lower wage earners.
“Anglo[Gold] is usually very flexible, but they were stubborn and very strategic about this issue,” says Zweni. “If job grading is not altered then it will carry on discriminating against black workers. They will always be ‘that group that speaks fanakaloko’ [a dialect used on the mines].”
The current grading system is based on what is known as the Patterson system. This system measures jobs according to their content and then establishes their comparative worth. Top levels include specialists, the middle level is technical staff and the lowest level is defined as “unskilled”. The mining houses translate this into levels three to eight. Three is the lowest level, with a minimum wage of R2 000.
Zweni says the improvement in hostel accommodation, which is part of the settlement, is “very close to his heart”. He lived in a single-sex hostel from 1984 to 1997 and says that for those years “he slept like a prisoner”.
Now he is part of a committee called the Community Protection Forum that has been mandated to improve the hostels, which are still home to about 45% of mineworkers.
“The hostels are not the same anymore as they were in previous times,” he says. “Now six to eight people share a room and they have single rather than bunk beds.”
But this rather crude improvement has been foiled by HIV/Aids, which Zweni says is spreading through the hostels like “wildfire”.
“There is still this mentality in some mining circles that ‘you’re black, you don’t know’,” says Zweni. “But life has improved for us. We’re still living on bones but now they have some meat.”