Chamber Vice President, Mark Cutifani said Wednesday, talks should have taken place earlier between the various role players in the platinum sector and AMCU.
JOHANNESBURG (Mineweb) – After expressing condolences and calling for all parties to be part of a solution to the devastating killings that took place at Lonmin’s Marikana mine last week, the Chamber of Mines of South Africa Vice President and CEO of AngloGold Ashanti, Mark Cutifani, has admitted that talks should have taken place earlier between role players in the platinum sector.
“Now in hindsight we probably all should have been talking even before the Impala issue and I think that we all agree that we’ve missed something in that process and we are trying to make that good” said Cutifani.
This comes on the back of the Chamber’s first meeting with rival union AMCU (The Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union) on Thursday afternoon. The response by Cutifani was in answer to a question as to why a meeting with AMCU had not taken place after three people were killed at Impala Platinum’s Rustenburg operations in February.
“We’re making sure that we don’t make that same mistake again in the future and we want to engage all of the players to ensure that we’ve got the relationships right” re-iterated Cutifani at the press briefing at the Chamber of Mines offices in Johannesburg late on Wednesday afternoon.
AMCU, established in 1998, is at loggerheads with the mining industry’s biggest union and ally to the ruling ANC, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and is aggressively recruiting disgruntled employees and NUM members.
Without elaborating on the details of the meeting with AMCU, the Chamber’s task team leader on the matter, Mike Teke (who is also the CEO of Optimum Coal and Vice-President of the Chamber), confirmed that this first meeting with the union was held in order to get an understanding of where AMCU is in terms of its status.
This, Teke explained, was to gain an understanding of how and where AMCU operated in the country and going forward for AMCU to get an understanding of what the Chamber’s role is.
Cutifani was at pains to explain that the Chamber does not get involved with local representation and bargaining at operations level where AMCU is involved but only with negotiations either at an industry specific commodity representative position or on a broader representative position.
“We do however try to dialogue with all the players in the industry because we are about the good of the overall industry so these are not formal negotiating processes” said Cutifani.
Bheki Sibiya, Chamber CEO, pointed out that the meeting with AMCU was not a consequence of the events on Thursday at Lonmin which saw 34 workers shot dead and 78 wounded when police tried to disperse striking miners. The meeting had already been requested on Tuesday last week after the slaying of 10 people, including 2 policemen, had occurred said Sibiya.
“Unfortunately the date that was set was for Friday last week and probably because of the Thursday [events] it got delayed to today” said Sibiya.
Sibiya said that the first challenge now would be to contain the violence and make sure that it doesn’t spill over somewhere else.
This may not have been achieved with reports of fresh pay demands from Anglo American Platinum (Amplats) workers as well as rock drill operators at Royal Bafokeng Platinum (RBPlats) having been confirmed by both companies.
Mpumi Sithole, Amplats media and external relations manager, said that the demands were handed over to management by a group of general workers who were demanding that the company revise a broad range of allowances.
Sithole confirmed that the workers were not represented by a union and that they had handed over the demands themselves. There had been no reports of staff not turning up for work or altercations on any of its mines said Sithole.
For the rest of this article, please go to the Mineweb.com website: http://www.mineweb.com/mineweb/view/mineweb/en/page72068?oid=157506&sn=Detail&pid=102055