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Noting that the annual Mining Indaba yet again ended up as a talk shop and produced nothing of real significance, Gideon du Plessis, general secretary of Solidarity, takes a critical look at the mining industry where “promises” abound, but where the challenges are both numerous and very real.
He goes on to analyse both those challenges and the promises, saying that the upshot of the disconnect is tension in the industry. Although all stakeholders want an ever larger helping of the pot of gold and no one wants to see the pot shrinking, the stakeholders put obstacles on the path of growth, the one blaming the other for the problems encountered. Yet, expanding the pot requires major mind and ideological shifts to ensure that those factors that can be brought under control are indeed controlled.
Du Plessis says that to get the mining industry into a growth curve, mechanisation and automation have to be implemented at those mines that lend themselves to it in order to develop a workers class that is more skilled and can thus earn higher wages that result from increased productivity and an enhanced set of skills. Other challenges, such as the system of migrant workers, also need to be addressed. In light of the five-month long 2014 platinum strike, labour legislation has to be revisited to make provision for compulsory arbitration after a limited period of striking. Moreover, it should be easier to deregister trade unions that act consistently outside the spirit of the law and that incite violence and intimidation. Other controllable matters, such as the majoritarian principle as it applies to trade union representivity and compliance with social and labour plans “simply require capable leadership and buy-in from all stakeholders”.
Du Plessis believes the choice is between a destructive, obsolete ideological and self-interested approach, which the ruling party and some trade unions subscribe to, and the creation of a mining environment based on market economy principles and the Bill of Rights, which Solidarity and most of the mining houses endorse.
Read this article in full at BizNews
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