City Press reports that the looming mass retrenchments at Impala Platinum’s (Implats’) Rustenburg mines are already causing panic among businesses in the local community.  

The job cuts, which the company says will see 13,000 workers being offloaded along with five shaft closures, will come only a few years after the area was brought to its knees by the country’s costliest wage strike in the mining sector.  In 2014 the majority union at Implats, the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu), staged a five-month strike over wages and that disaster is still fresh in the community’s memory.  The strike was one of the costliest in the history of the platinum sector and the majority of businesses have not fully recovered from that period.  

According to Liau Matale, a National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) leader who is also a training instructor at Implats, the retrenchments will have a devastating outcome for the mine community.  Recalling how the residents of the mine’s hostels have not recovered from the 2014 strike, Matale said the eventual losers would be the community as crime would skyrocket.  He claimed that some of the hostels were full of criminals and prostitution was rife, so the upcoming retrenchments were bound to spell disaster within the mine compounds and nearby communities.  Matale dismissed the idea that strike action might be a viable option to pressure the mine from retrenching.  “No one will go for a strike I can tell you that.  The repercussions of that will last for at least five years.  People felt the pain of that 2014 strike,” he observed.

Read this report by Lesetja Malope in full at Fin24

Read too, Rustenburg’s rise stifled by losses, at Fin24

Get other news reports at the SA Labour News home page