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Johannesburg - South Africa will burn if the country’s economic policy remains targeted at luring investors without correcting the mistakes of the past, according to Joseph Mathunjwa, president of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu).
He was speaking on Thursday with two top leaders from the industry – Harmony founder Bernard Swanepoel and Terence Goodlace, executive director of Impala Platinum (Implats), the first big mining company to recognise Amcu at the Joburg Indaba – about problems in the mining industry.
The discussion happened a day or two after Mathunjwa declared that Amcu was following a well-reasoned strategy to create a Marikana-style strike at gold mines.
During another discussion, statistics showed that productivity at mines was suffering. Swanepoel asked Mathunjwa how unions could help to solve this. He countered that mines had been “very productive” between 2002 and 2010, and only mentioned productivity when they wanted to cut labour. He also bemoaned the conditions of colonialism that had led to migrant workers only seeing their families “three or four times” a year. He said that a job was “not a gift”.
Goodlace wanted people to have a dream and vision for an industry in which they could “all be proud of what we do and how we do it, which attracts people, and processes and technology are brought together”.
Implats has invested more than R2bn on housing for its staff, but has only reached half of its target. Goodlace said the mine’s social and labour plan was being treated with great respect.
Mathunjwa later quipped, in answer to a question about nationalisation, that it should be considered if it could repair the past’s mistakes. “The current government has in any case nationalised the National Union of Mineworkers,” he said to laughter.
He said investing in workers’ skills would be a true indicator of progress.
Delegates – chief among them Rick Menell, heir of the old Anglovaal mining empire, and Jim Rutherford, executive director of Anglo American – spoke with Mathunjwa for two hours afterwards.
