Retrenched miners face a bleak future

The mining industry is to shed another 28,000 jobs by the end of this year, forcing those facing retrenchment to go back to the rural areas of South Africa and neighbouring countries where they face an uncertain future with no prospect of finding other employment, trade union officials told IRIN. "The bulk of the miners to be retrenched come from the rural areas of the Eastern Cape and Northern provinces and from neighbouring countries of Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Namibia, Mozambique and Malawi," Archie Phalane, the assistant general secretary of the South African National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) told IRIN on Tuesday. "There are no jobs that the retrenched miners can take up once they have been axed, thereby condemning them and their families to a life of destitution," said Phalane. Phalane said although the gold mining industry is the most affected, the retrenchments cut across the entire mining industry, among these the platinum, chrome and coal mines. "The decline in the price of gold is used by mine owners as a scapegoat to restructure the mines in order to maximise profits," Phalane said. He added that the mines tend to replace retrenched miners with sub-contracted labourers who are paid low wages, enjoy no benefits and work under bad conditions. "There has been no benefit for workers when the selling price of gold was high," said Phalane, "however, miners are the first to suffer when the price drops." The price of gold has dropped to about US $255 an ounce from its usual high of US $350 and above, the major reason being the recent sale of the bullion's reserves by Western countries to fund debt relief for poor countries. Phalane argued that the mining industry should be growing rather than shedding jobs. "There are companies sitting with licences to mine that are not doing this, while there are still large deposits of ore that remain unexploited." The NUM, the mining houses and the government have responded to the crisis by forming a Gold Crisis Committee (GCC), whose main brief is to find ways of stemming the loss of jobs in the gold mining industry. "The GCC, however, needs to shift its emphasis away from concentrating only on the crisis in the gold mining industry and to look at the crisis dogging the entire mining industry in general," said Phalane. At the same time, the steel and engineering industry is also suffering job losses as a direct result of retrenchments in the mining industry. An official of the Steel and Engineering Industries Federation of South Africa (SEIFSA) told IRIN: "Our industry has been shedding between 1,000 and 2,000 jobs per month due to the loss of contracts with the mining industry."