[miningmx.com] – PLATINUM wage agreements last year had ratcheted up the pressure on the gold industry to meet similar increases long before Gold Fields said it would pay an average 10% a year over three years with its employees.
This is the view of Nick Holland, CEO of Gold Fields, who added that the company’s gold industry colleagues were concerned his firm’s wage agreement with some 3,500 employees at its South Deep mine would put them under pressure when they sat down with unions from June this year.
“The pressure point was already there in terms of entry level wages by the platinum sector and its agreement last year,” said Holland. “So we don’t feel concluding early with the NUM (National Union of Mineworkers) was a major issue,” he added. Holland was commenting in a media roundtable following Gold Fields first quarter results.
“They [rival South African gold firms] would have preferred us to stay in, but we did explain the reasons for it,” he said. Gold Fields announced in April that it had signed a three-year wage agreement with unions at its South Deep mine in which it will lift salaries an average 10% per year.
Said Holland today: “They are concerned it may compromise their position, but we kept saying ‘… let’s remember, we are a mechanised mine and you are not.
“We employ 3,500 out of 130,000 [gold industry] employees. We also have different economic circumstances to your own mines. I hope that unions will be flexible enough in their negotiations”.
Holland said his firm’s relations with other gold companies in South Africa remained stable. “We collaborate on many issues still and look to each other for different things from time to time.
“But we had to do what we had to do in interests of South Deep and shareholders. It was not an easy decision but necessary one”.
Gold Fields wage deal was principally with the NUM and UASA. The fractious Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union is not on Gold Fields’ payroll at South Deep so it is therefore not recognised by the company for purposes of wage negotiations.
