[miningmx.com] – COLLECTIVE bargaining is often compared to a tough contact sport, whilst a strike, the consequence of collective bargaining, is often compared to a boxing match.
The strike continues until one of the two boxers throws in the towel or scores a knockout. A knockout by an employer is when a union orders striking workers to return to work without a wage increase, or perhaps with a just a nominal one. A knockout by a trade union is an increase of 2% or more above the employers’ offer when the strike began.
However, none of these allusions is fully appropriate to the strike that started at gold mines the night of September 3 and was in full swing yesterday. The power struggle between the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and the Association of Mineworkers & Construction Union (AMCU), the role that NUM plays in national politics and the plight of most South African gold mines, make this strike the most dangerous that we have experienced in years, perhaps decades.
For several of the employers, and for both trade unions, this strike is a real struggle for survival. There is a great danger that some of the participants could resort to unusual and desperate steps.
AMCU’s STRATEGY
AMCU is dominant at the richest mines on the Western Witwatersrand – Driefontein, Kusasulethu and Mponeng. It is no supporter of central bargaining and can make a strong case that these mines should grant bigger increases than the others.
AMCU’s strategy is obvious: sit back and wait until NUM has been on strike for two or three days, or whatever, and reaches a settlement with the poorer mines. Then it demands a higher increase than the settlement with NUM and comes out on strike at the three rich mines where it is in control of the workforce.
There are already indications that AMCU has considerably more support at the gold mines than is credited. If AMCU succeeds in forcing a higher wage increase than NUM from the mine owners, it could mean the end NUM. Just as at the largest platinum mines, NUM members have joined AMCU in droves.
On NUM’s side of the fence, the mining bosses reason that a settlement with NUM can be extended to the other mines because all three belong to members of the Chamber of Mines. They believe on the basis of advice that it is legal to expand the settlement, even though there is no bargaining council for gold mines.
It’s no foregone conclusion, but if AMCU’s members come out on strike for higher wages than at the other mines and are dismissed, since, according to the mine owners, it would be an unprotected strike, it could easily take two years before a court finds that the dismissals were unfair.
Mine owners hope that by that time, the dispute will have exploded in AMCU’s face and it would have lost most of its support at the gold mines.
In most of these mass dismissals, most of the workers are usually just re-appointed three weeks or so later, because it would be a logistic nightmare to replace 5,000 to 10,000 workers.
However, Neil Froneman, head of Sibanye Gold, which has 34,600 workers in its service, has prepared himself well for an extended strike. He has even held back an interim dividend of R1.3bn so that he has ammunition for a strike. This is the only gold producer that can afford that.
Froneman is quite capable of dismissing all AMCU’s members at Driefontein, bring the mine to a stop for three months and replace the entire workforce with new workers in that period.
It would be a very risky strategy and will almost certainly unleash violence. But it could work.
However, there is a third possibility.
Say NUM settles for somewhere between 8% and 10%, but NUM’s members are not happy with the settlement. AMCU now calls a strike almost immediately at the richer mines. And NUM members at the mines where this union still has the majority decide they are not going back to work. They continue with their strike. After all, the hardest part of any strike is to get the strikers to go back to work.
Everything that has happened in the mining industry in the past year will make reasonable people realise that such a scenario is a possibility.
This year’s gold-mine strike is rather like spoiled teenagers playing “chicken’ with new vehicles that they aren’t used to: there are several possible fatal results for more than one party.
