Amcu gears up for weekend of protest

[miningmx.com] – AFTER calling off the wildcat strikes at three Anglo American Platinum (Amplats) mines the night before last, the Associated Mineworkers & Construction Union (Amcu) said further protest action should be expected against the planned job cuts at Amplats.

Mineral Resources Minister, Susan Shabangu, also met Amplats CEO Chris Griffith in Pretoria yesterday to discuss the group’s plans to close four shafts at Rustenburg and lay off 14 000 workers.

Amcu said it was going to hold a mass meeting with its members at Amplats this weekend to discuss the dismissal of the workers.

“We convinced the striking workers at the three mines to return to work by telling them what the prescribed legal procedures are regarding job cuts,’ Amcu president Joseph Mathunjwa said at a news conference in Johannesburg yesterday morning.

He pointed out that the Labour Relations Act in fact makes provision for protected strikes against job cuts, but there are also other possibilities that can be considered.

“We will set out the alternatives at the mass meeting this weekend. However, we are definitely not in favour of unprotected strikes outside the law,’ Mathunjwa said.

Amcu was not invited to the information meeting for trade unions held by Amplats on Tuesday to inform them about the proposed job cuts and to hand the legally prescribed notice over to them.

However, the company delivered the notice by courier to Amcu’s head office in Witbank on Wednesday.

Griffith admitted in an interview with Fin24 that Amcu had not been invited to the meeting, but said the union would in future be fully involved in the restructuring process.

It is also clear that Amcu is rapidly picking up members of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) at Amplats. NUM was the dominant union in the mining industry for decades.

Amcu said it had informed Amplats in December that 14,000 of Amplats’s workers had joined Amcu. It handed stop orders for union membership fees for these 14,000 workers to Amplats to confirm this claim.

“Our latest figures show that we now have about 26,000 members at Amplats,’ Mathunjwa said yesterday.

He also called on the government to intervene in the job cuts at Amplats.

“The government must convene a meeting of all stakeholders so that there can be collective talks about retrenchments in the mining industry. It is time for South Africans to stand together and make sure that mining in the country benefits as a whole,’ he said.