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Unions rebuff Anglo Pt's revised wage offer
Allan Seccombe
Posted: Wed, 30 May 2007

[miningmx.com] -- SOUTH Africa’s two largest mineworker unions rejected a revised wage offer from Anglo Platinum on Thursday, raising the prospect of industrial action at the world’s biggest producer of the precious metal.

Anglo Platinum upped its offer to six percent from its opening offer of five percent, but it dropped the offer of a 30% once-off bonus on workers’ monthly wages.

The largest union, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) is demanding 15%, while its peers Solidarity decreased its demand to 15% from 18%.

“We would like to remind the powers that be at Anglo that the NUM is in no way playing when it talks of double digits. It is a mandate given to us by our members in the wake of booming commodity prices,” NUM said in a statement after wage talks on Wednesday.
going to be industrial action
Greg Potter, a trader at Nedcor Securities, said the chances of industrial action and jitters about platinum supplies in a very tight market, were likely given the vast difference in the position of the two sides.

“The platinum counters have been experiencing fantastic margins and the workers want to benefit too,” he said on the Classic Business Day week-nightly radio show.

“We are getting closer but at 6% and 15% you can still drive a bus through there,” he said. “There’s going to be industrial action with such a difference in ‘bid’ and ‘ask’, so to speak.”

Difficult wage talks were widely anticipated given the massive run up in the price of commodities over the past year. Mining companies have made it clear they want to contain costs in an environment where the price of inputs across the board have run up strongly.

Labour makes up half of mining companies’ costs in South Africa.

April consumer inflation data released on Wednesday burst through the South African Reserve Bank’s inflation target of 3% to 6%, coming in at 6.3%, shocking economists who had on average forecast 5.9%. There are widespread expectations that the Reserve Bank will have to raise interest rates in June.

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Solidarity said it was “unimpressed” by Anglo Platinum’s revised offer, pointing out it was lower than the inflation data.

“The unions’ patience is running out. Only time will tell how long Anglo Platinum intends to continue with its cat and mouse game,” said Solidarity’s Reint Dykema.

The talks relate to 42,000 workers at Anglo Platinum, Solidarity said.

Anglo Platinum has said it is still early in the bargaining process and has declined to make further comment.

Meanwhile, Solidarity has raised the prospect of a strike in the 270,000-strong metal and engineering sector when wage talks ended ‘in deadlock” on Wednesday. Both sides will meet again on 5 and 6 June to resume talks ahead of the current wage agreement’s expiry at the end of June.

“If these attempts are unsuccessful, a formal dispute will be declared after which the unions will apply for a strike certificate,” said Johan Pieterse, Solidarity’s general secretary for the metal and engineering industry.

In those negotiations, Solidarity is asking for an 11% increase, but the companies in the sector are offer 5.5%.

“We urgently want to see more seriousness on the part of employers if massive protest action in July is to be averted,” he said.