The National Union of Mineworkers.
All of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) union's hopes are now pinned on the outcome of a dispute lodged with the Centre for Conciliation Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) on the interpretation and implementation of the recognition agreement it had with Lonmin.
Its urgent application to the Labour Court on June 27 to extend its 90-day window before derecognition pending the outcome of its CCMA dispute was struck off the roll with costs on Monday. In the judgment, judge Richard Lagrange found that the question of "whether or not the [revocation] forms were properly verified" – a question that forms a crucial part of the NUM's CCMA dispute with Lonmin – is the subject matter of factual dispute of a considerable scale which cannot be determined in these proceedings."
In an affidavit submitted to the Labour Court by the NUM's Lonmin co-ordinator, Timmy Timbela, the union argued that there were several inconsistencies in the processing of over 12 000 stop orders, which signify the transfer of its membership to the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu), inconsistencies that render the process fundamentally invalid.
In a responding affidavit, Lonmin proposed a secret ballot to spare it the arduous burden of dealing with the NUM's claims, a move that could be read as sympathetic to the NUM. In an Amcu affidavit, treasurer general Jimmy Gama stated that "if thousands of NUM members had been unlawfully transferred, employees would have been aware of this and there would have been an uprising of disgruntled employees and/or thousands of complaints which would have been lodged with Lonmin, which there haven't been".
In his own analysis of the recognition agreement Lagrange found that the "agreement itself makes no mention of a revocation form having to be acknowledged by the employer as a prerequisite for verification".
A CCMA session to hear the matter convenes on Wednesday, but if the history of similar circumstances (surrounding the recognition of Amcu at Impala is considered), the sun is about to set on the NUM at Lonmin for the next while.
No benefits
?Without offices, transport facilities, full-time shopstewards and other benefits associated with majority union status, the NUM is pushed out to a cold environment where worker consensus is often forcefully maintained, as analysts have pointed out, due to the decentralisation of worker accommodation.
The chances of the NUM's resurgence at Lonmin are made all the more difficult by Amcu's insistence on a recognition agreement with thresholds similar to those that protected the NUM's hegemony over the platinum belt for several years.
If current CCMA talks between Lonmin and Amcu are anything to go by, thresholds are unlikely to be anything other than 35% for basic rights (the right to recruit on the mine), 45% for collective bargaining rights and rights to full-time shopstewards and 50% plus 1% for majority union rights. No agreement has been reached on the matter, though, and it is due for arbitration on July 29.
With the NUM's membership at Lonmin said to have fallen below 20%, the climb back to 35% is unlikely at least not without cracks in Amcu's promise to offer better representation to its constituency. It is at this point that Lagrange's question becomes significant: What concrete steps did the NUM take to reverse the loss of membership (which it was aware of as early August 2012) and if such steps were taken, why did they yield no results?
The fact of the matter is that worker discontent with the union predates Marikana, predates the volatile environment precipitated by the Impala strike, and, in reality emerges from the union's own weaknesses. It was these weaknesses that Amcu was able to exploit.