Strydom not the first to query CCMA role

[miningmx.com] – IT was risky for Elize Strydom to tell a journalist, even on an off-the-record basis, that she regretted her work at Nedlac and that she thought some officials at the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration were incompetent.

A moment of misjudgement, however, is not enough to justify the barracking Strydom has received by the CCMA; after all, she is a highly esteemed member of the Chamber of Mines. It’s also sad now that she’s unlikely to share her insights and personal perspective with other journalists – always valuable when wading through the politicking that is wage negotiation.

Yet criticism of the CCMA’s role in the platinum sector is not exactly a new phenomenon. Khanyisile Kweyama, executive director of Anglo American South Africa, told Miningmx in February that the commission’s role in the platinum wage negotiations had become questionable.

The CCMA’s role in the “platinum space”, as she termed it, was not “to run wage negotiations, but to arbitrate”. The only reason the CCMA was convening arbitration was because the Association of Mineworkers & Construction Union had refused to recognise any other bargaining framework; be it collective bargaining or even the deputy president’s framework agreement which sets down broad rules for engagement none of which allowed for AMCU’s, dare I say it, sullenness.

Even when Strydom took the gold dispute to the CCMA last year, a wage negotiation discussed mostly with the National Union of Mineworkers, Solidarity and UASA, it was the highly regarded labour specialist, Peter Harris, who led the arbitration at the CCMA, not CCMA officials.

Now, however, the already deepening crisis in the platinum strike has just become deeper, and more complex.

An unnamed analyst told BDLive that the economic urgencies of the platinum strike would ultimately drive the negotiation process. True, probably. But the Strydom issue will obfuscate the process; time will be spent discussing how to continue the wage negotiation process rather than on what should be discussed.

All the while, the clock is ticking on platinum inventories, worker salaries (and indebtedness), and revenue losses. Net debt is rising, mining faces will become more difficult to re-enter, and the funk into which South Africa’s labour relations has descended will deepen, or thicken, or have greater capacity to perplex.