Mining Weekly reports that the 45-day strike at Gold Fields’ South Deep mine over job cuts has officially ended with the signing of a formal settlement agreement between the gold producer and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM).
Employees have been returning to work since last Thursday, when the union called off the strike, but the formal agreement was only signed on Tuesday. In terms thereof, the retrenchments of 1,082 employees will go ahead, with most of them having already been processed. The NUM branch at South Deep started its strike action on 2 November to protest the retrenchments, necessitated by financial losses of about R100-million a month. To alleviate the financial burden of employees who were on the ‘no-work no-pay’ strike, South Deep has agreed to deduct the lost earnings over four months and to pay all non-management employees an ex-gratia payment of 20% of basic pay should they have returned to work by 15 December. They can also earn back part of their lost earnings if monthly gold production targets were exceeded in January and February, the company said. NUM spokesperson Livhuwani Mammburu confirmed that the strike had ended.
- Read the original report on this story in full at Mining Weekly
- Read too, Lengthy strike over Gold Fields job cuts ends, at Fin24
- Read Gold Fields’ press statement in this regard at Moneyweb
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