[miningmx.com] – ANGLO American Platinum (Amplats) hoped a recent wage settlement in the platinum sector, and a prolonged period of engagement between it and unions would stand the company in good stead ahead of wage talks.
Asked whether the platinum sector faced similar union intransigence that had led to the calling of a gold sector strike by the National Union of Mineworkers, Chris Griffith, CEO of Amplats said: “If there is some mitigation, it’s that we have spent more time with unions [than the gold sector]”.
“I have done six or more presentations [to unions]. Our exco team has done the same or more. The position of the platinum industry has come over a longer period of time whereas the very sharp drop in the gold price has been quite recent,” Griffith said.
“Perhaps unions in gold don’t have that level of understanding. I can only suggest that is something in our favour,” said Griffith.
However, he believed wage talks would be testing. “The demands are the same. We still have over 100% increase [in wages] requests. But we have seen some settlements in platinum that will give us some hope,” he said.
Aquarius Platinum announced on June 25 that it has reached a one-year wage deal at its Kroondal mine with its majority union, the NUM covering some 8,120 workers. The agreement is thought to be just above consumer price inflation.
Elize Strydom, chief negotiator for the Chamber of Mines, and Graham Briggs, CEO of Harmony Gold whose company was represented by the chamber in wage talks, said yesterday there had been no real sense of negotiation with unions after nearly two months of engagement.
“This is the first time I have experienced this. In my view, this is not negotiation,’ said Strydom after gold producers’ attempts to reach a wage agreement failed after unions rejected its 6.5% and 6% offers.
“It might be an issue of inter-union rivalry. If one of them blinks, where does it leave the other one,’ said Strydom referring to the rivalry between the NUM and the Association of Mineworkers & Construction Unionn (AMCU).
NUM is the majority union in the gold sector with the AMCU controlling only 17% of gold industry workers (although that figure may be increasing) whereas the opposite is true in the platinum sector where AMCU is dominant.
“It is a difficult labour relations environment at the moment. It will be fairly fraught,” said Griffiths earlier in a presentation today in which the Anglo American subsidiary unveiled significantly reduced retrenchment numbers in terms of the restructuring of its Rustenburg operations.
The group said that 3,300 employees would be retrenched with a one month notice period to start on September 2. This is far lower than first expected, especially late last year when in the first iteration of Amplats’ restructuring proposals it said up to 14,000 employees would be affected by its plans.
It later pared back the number of employees likely to be affected by the restructuring to 6,000 and added today that redeployment and voluntary retrenchments proposals would be accepted by 2,700 employees. That meant that of the 6,000 affected, some 3,300 retrenchments would be suffered by the group.
Griffith said the restructuring of the Rustenburg shafts would help them edge down the cost-curve. He warned, however, that they would never be low cost operations.
“This is an industry in real trouble. Half of this industry is making a loss,” said Griffith who added that before the restructuring, the shafts were losing R1bn every six months. “We will be an employer again, but we have to restructure now to make the business sustainable so we can grow again when times are good,” he said.
