Gold mine layoffs

Close to 12,000 miners in South Africa are threatened with job losses as a result of the tumble in international gold prices, news reports said on Wednesday. The Gold Crisis Committee - a forum of government, labour and mine owners - is to discuss applications for 11,700 lay-offs from six mines at a meeting on Thursday. The South African gold mining industry is a major employer in the region and retrenchments could have a significant impact on neighbouring countries, analysts said. The price of gold has fallen by about US $30 an ounce since the Bank of England announced in May that it would sell some 60 percent of its gold reserves, and an International Monetary Fund (IMF) proposal to offload 10 million ounces. Following the first British auction on Tuesday, gold opened at US $255.60 an ounce in Johannesburg on Wednesday, a new 20-year low. The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) said this week that 6,000 jobs have already been lost this year. The figure could rise to more than 20,000 "soon", and if gold prices continued to slide, an estimated 80,000 jobs are in jeopardy, 'Business Day' reported. Labour, business and the South African government have condemned the IMF proposal as a further threat to gold prices. The IMF plan, to use gold sales to fund its portion of debt relief, was announced at a meeting of G-7 industrialised countries in Cologne last month. But serious hurdles remain - not least the agreement of the US Congress - before the IMF sales can go through as part of the G-7 initiative for Highly Indebted Poor Countries. "Ideally, what we want to see is debt written off rather than funds found for debt relief," John Garrett of the debt pressure group Jubilee 2000 told IRIN on Wednesday.