Platinum strike: government to intervene

THE government has resolved to intervene in the platinum belt strike after four months, during which many workers have been driven to the brink of starvation and financial ruin.

New Mineral Resources Minister Ngoako Ramatlhodi said last night the government had little choice but to abandon its hands-off approach to the protracted strike in favour of direct participation in finding a solution.

Labour relations in the sector had collapsed and the government, unions and business would together have to restore them, he said.

At the last count, the industrial impasse had cost miners more than R7-billion in wages and platinum producers more than R100-billion in lost production. Desperate miners have made the arduous trip back home, most of them to the Eastern Cape. Those who remain on the platinum belt get by on food parcels.

Ramatlhodi, in the job for only a few hours, was due to receive a late-night briefing from his department's director-general on the status of the wage dispute between the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu) and the platinum producers.

Amcu is demanding an immediate entry-level salary of R12500 a month for its members but the mining houses have argued that they could offer only gradually implemented increases that would reach the mineworkers' target in 2017.

Ramatlhodi, aware Amcu believes the government is hostile to it because it dethroned the ANC-aligned National Union of Mineworkers as the biggest union in the platinum sector, promised to deal equally with all parties.

He said the government's direct intervention in the nearly 20-week impasse was geared towards winning a settlement. "That is my first job."

He warned "we will enforce ANC policies of radical economic transformation in mining" and decried what he said was the mining companies' abandonment of their social responsibilities to mining communities.

Asked whether he was satisfied that mining houses contributed justly to society, Ramatlhodi said: "They do pay taxes, so I guess they do play their part, but one gets the feeling that they have been neglecting their social responsibility obligations." - Olebogeng Molatlhwa and TJ Strydom