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SA gold miners hit hard in strike
I-Net Bridge/Reuters
Posted: Wed, 23 Jul 2008
[miningmx.com] -- Gold producers with operations on South Africa's Witwatersrand were the hardest hit by Wednesday's stay away by members
of Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu).
Cosatu protested in the Gauteng, North West, Limpopo and the Eastern
Cape provinces on Wednesday as part of its series of one-day protests in each
province, culminating in a nationwide stay away on August 6.
Trade union members are protesting against rising food, fuel and electricity prices, which are fast eroding their members' monthly income. The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), which is a member of the Cosatu federation of unions joined the strike.
"The NUM is pleased by the turn out and will flex its muscles even more for the August 6 action," the 320,000-strong union said.
Gold Fields said 91% of underground night and morning shifts at its Kloof operations were absent from work, and while attendance in mechanised areas of South Deep was 90%, there was almost no attendance in other areas of the mine.
Gold Fields spokesperson Daniel Thole said it was "too early to assess the impact on production", but added that typical approximate daily production at Kloof was about 95kg.
"We anticipate all operations to be back to normal by tonight,"
Thole said.
Workers at Harmony Gold's Gauteng and North West mines and surface operations supported the strike.
"We have contractors at work at some of the operations; we also have some of our plants processing for the next 12 hours," said Harmony spokesperson Amelia Soares, who added that mineworkers should return to work on Wednesday night at the start of the night shift. Between 30kg and 32kg of gold would be lost, she said.
AngloGold Ashanti's essential services are running at all of its operations.
"In the West Wits area – that is Mponeng, Tau Tona and Savuka – we are experiencing very little impact from the strike action. Production has been able to continue," said AngloGold spokeswoman Joanne Jones.
But Jones said AngloGold Ashanti, South Africa's biggest gold producer, had been more heavily affected in the Vaal River area, where there would be some impact on production.
One of the main reasons for the low
impact of the one-day stay away on AngloGold Ashanti is the fact that it has been holding "fairly intensive dialogue with the unions over the last weeks to mitigate the impact of the strike action," she said.
Jones was not able to quantify the impact on production but said the company would be working in the coming months to make up any lost production.
Anglo Platinum said its operations had been largely unaffected by the one-day strike. Spokesman Simon Tebele said only about four percent of workers had stayed away at the company's biggest mine in Rustenburg, and other mines had seen almost normal turnout.
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