About two hundred members of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) at a Murray and Roberts plant handed over a memorandum of grievances to company management in Marikana outside Rustenburg on Monday.
Workers want the company to implement a wage agreement reached last year.
Workers’ representative Moabi Serobatse said that in terms of the wage agreement workers were supposed to be paid a minimum of R1 950 per month, but that this was not the case.
”We do not know what prohibits the company from paying the agreed wage. We are now preparing for wage talks and we are not sure what are we going to talk about in the light of non-compliance from the company.”
Serobatse said workers also wanted the company to do away with the hostel system, saying black workers were confined to hostels while their white counterparts were ”cocooned in luxury townhouses at the expense of the company”.
The memorandum also states that workers want the company to come forward with a housing strategy.
Serobatse said there was a need for the company to assist workers with houses as most of them could not stay with their families in hostels.
Accepting the memorandum, operation manager Andre Swanepoel told the marchers that the company did not discriminate against workers based on their colour.
Speaking in Fanakalo (a language used in the mine), Swanepoel said all of the company’s employees were important as workers irrespective of their colour or ethnic group.
He promised the company would respond to the memorandum within the stipulated seven days. — Sapa