Business
Technology Trumps Tradition in Bid to End South Africa Mine Strike
However, Amplats chief executive Chris Griffith said on Tuesday the firms had polled miners using “interactive voice message” technology in a variety of languages and reached a definitive answer. “It’s pretty much like a call center that calls you and you can choose Options 1, 2 or 3,” he told Johannesburg’s Talk Radio 702.
Griffith went on to say, “We put out very simple messages: Do you want to come back to work? Do you want to accept the offer on the table? And the majority of employees in Lonmin, Implats and Amplats are saying to us ‘We want to come back to work.'” Amplats said many of its workers had already returned to Rustenburg, where police have deployed in force to try to prevent a bloody showdown with AMCU die-hards, and bus vouchers were being given to those still in the Eastern Cape.
However, not everybody is taking up the offer. “I must wait for AMCU to call me back,” said 29-year-old Implats employee Malibongwe Nodangala, standing outside an informal bar in his village. Another Eastern Cape Implats worker, who declined to be named, was defiant. “It is not finished yet,” he told Reuters.
FAMILY PRESSURE
Those who choose to hold out are going to be under huge pressure from families that have now gone four months with zero pay remitted from husbands, fathers and brothers in the mines, often their only source of income. For 39-year-old Nosandile Mnqotho, who has seven children aged between two and 21, that means having to use meagre government grants to support her husband, who came home from Implats in March but returned to Rustenburg last month. “I send 400 rand ($38.50) a month to my husband,” she said.
The companies are offering wage increases of up to 10 percent which they say would raise the overall minimum pay package, including cash allowances for expenses such as housing, to 12,500 rand a month by July 2017. AMCU had initially demanded an immediate increase to 12,500 rand in the basic wage, excluding allowances, but softened that in March to staggered increases that would amount to 12,500 rand within three or four years; still a third more than the offer from the companies.
The strike is the longest and costliest ever to have hit South Africa’s mines and has halted 40 percent of normal global platinum production, although the platinum price has remained relatively static as the companies have run down reserves.
Source: CNBC Africa
