[miningmx.com] – ALL eyes on Joseph Mathunjwa‘s AMCU (Association of Mineworkers & Construction Union) on Sunday (October 11) when his union stage a mass meeting near Sibanye Gold’s Driefontein mine, a strong-hold for member support.
It’s expected that AMCU members will use the meeting to debate and vote on whether to exercise their rights to a strike at the mines of Sibanye Gold, or possibly announce a rejection of the signed wage deal with Harmony Gold and AngloGold Ashanti which would then lead to a wider unprotected strike across the gold sector.
The attention is, of course, exactly as Mathunjwa would want it. AMCU may be chaotic in places, but its tactics are clear: be provocative, hard-line, and unyielding in order to undermine the employer-labour movement status quo.
This may expose members to the hardships of strike action, help foment violence within the mining community, and make a mockery of the efforts of the Chamber of Mines, but it also wins Mathunjwa members, and members maketh the business case.
In more than three months of gold industry negotiations, AMCU has yielded not one jot to industry demands. Compromise is what other unions do: those whose part it is to have failed to deliver a reasonable working wage after 20 years of democracy.
For three days during gold industry wage negotiations, the companies opened up their books in an effort to demonstrate the economics of the labour cost; about what could be achieved and what was unsustainable.
Unions, including the NUM, were resistant to this kind of co-operation. When Dick Forsland, AMCU’s economist-consultant began to show an interest, he was told by AMCU to desist from that type of engagement.
The preference now among all unions to capture wage demands as a rands and cents number rather than as a percentage increase – starting with R12,500/month, the clarion call of the Marikana protests – is an AMCU innovation.
This is how Mathunjwa’s AMCU has tapped into zeitgeist of the common man, assisted by his talent for evangelical oratory, and the sinister and broader union modus operandi of intimidation. Stories abound among the mining companies of AMCU seeding the voting process which is public. Expect AMCU to staunchly resist proposals for a secret ballot to decide strike action.
So far, the strategy has worked. Across both platinum and gold, AMCU is a more powerful union today than it was a year ago, and certainly more powerful than in 2013 when it controlled 17% of the gold mining industry (30% today).
Sibanye Gold CEO, Neal Froneman, has publicly stated that his employees don’t want to strike – there’s certainly less appetite than ahead of last year’s five month platinum strike, he says – so it will be fascinating to see how Mathunjwa plays the mass rally on Sunday.
One expects he’ll do what’s best for business; his business that is.
