[miningmx.com] – THE PRICE of platinum surged more than two percent, equal to $30 per ounce, but for all the wrong reasons.
This was not a platinum price improvement informed by the widely called-for supply discipline from producers, but on the back of a disastrous supply disruption: a week-long strike at Lonmin’s Marikana mine which has seen as many as 47 miners slayed, some 30 people or more by the police services on August 16.
According to reports, the violence flows from strike activity initiated by rock drill operators (RDOs), a class of aggrieved miner the complaints of which were harnassed to distressing effect at Impala Platinum’s (Implats’) Rustenburg mine less than five months ago. Lives were lost then, so was production. One can only imagine the nervous tension between the offices of Terence Goodlace, Implats’ CEO, and his management.
In the case of Implats, the Associated Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu) helped lead RDOs into their initial protests, and then, almost mysteriously, vanished amid the violent chaos that followed. After the dust had settled, it then emerged to claim it was challenging the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) as the majority union and that NUM had responded badly to the challenge, after years of complacent dominance.
So it’s instructive that the voice of Amcu’s president, Joseph Mathunjwa, was captured so arrestingly by Reuters at Marikana today which quoted him as “saying’: “We’re going nowhere. If need be, we’re prepared to die’. He was speaking through a loud-hailer to cheers among followers, just before the police advance that crazily saw the discharge of live ammunition.
One suspects the NUM hasn’t responded particularly well to Amcu’s challenge, but where is Implats’ efforts, one of former CEO David Brown’s last initiatives, to reach a multi-union agreement at Implat’s Rustenburg mine. This was his solution rather than the winner-takes-all approach to union representation which has raised the stakes between competing parties so high. If Implats can found the model for agreement between Amcu and the NUM, perhaps Lonmin and others can adopt it.
The focus now must be on quelling unrest at Marikana and for union leadership to set aside competition for employee fees and provide a unified front in an effort to stop the violence spreading to other platinum mines in South Africa where the almost harmonious balance between management and the NUM has been unseated.
It is, after all, worth noting that Amcu has a further 5,000 members at Lonmin’s Western Platinum “Karee’ mine where it has organisational rights. A recruitment drive has also been long initiated at Anglo American Platinum (Amplats), described by Mathunjwa was “fairly intense’ on June 6. Bear in mind, Amplats is planning a possible restructuring at its operations from the year-end – a likely disruption that will require significant, responsible union and management mediation.
