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Cashless home loans for migrant mineworkers on way

Teba CEO Dr Graham Herbert talks to Mining Weekly's Martin Creamer about the concept to cashless home loans for migrant mineworkers. Photographs: Duane Daws. Video and Video Editing: Shane Williams

18th December 2014

By: Martin Creamer

Creamer Media Editor

  

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JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – A system of providing incremental cashless home loans to migrant mineworkers living in distant areas is being implemented.

Teba CEO Dr Graham Herbert, who spoke to Mining Weekly Online in the attached video interview on potential improvements to the much-criticised migrant labour system, says early piloting of cashless home loans has proved successful.

“We’re now starting to roll this out as a service,” says the head of the 112-year-old organisation.

Cashless home loans cater for the delivery of building material to distant labour-sending areas to allow migrant mineworkers to build homes for themselves or to renovate existing dwellings.

Traditionally, it has been difficult for migrants to raise loans through the banking system in areas where there is no security of land tenure and this cashless solution addresses those shortcomings.

Allowing migrant mineworkers to go home more frequently is another improvement being formulated.

Teba’s starting point of migrant mineworkers being allowed to work for six months and then go home for three months met with mining company concern that far more mineworkers would have to be employed to make up for those at home.

However, Teba does not see additional employment as a problem and believes that the mining companies should be turning to government for youth wage subsidies and other government offerings to provide training to a younger group of mineworkers from local areas.

The organisation sees this as an initiative that will lessen the reliance on distant mineworkers and provide opportunities to the large number of unemployed youth.

Herbert expects the Mining Charter audit now under way to expose shortcomings in traditional distant labour-sending areas, which have tended to be deprioritised as a result of emphasis being placed on host communities and attempts to modernise the migrant labour system.

Teba is in support of that but points to the excellent housing programmes in host communities taking centre stage possibly at the expense of traditional labour-sending areas, where development programmes are difficult to mange.

South Africa’s largest recruiter of mineworkers is not expecting to do any recruiting for the next year to 18 months and estimates that number of mineworkers employed in gold mining and platinum mining in South Africa is likely to decline by about 8% a year in the next two years.

Recruitment demographics have also changed and distance recruiting has fallen away markedly.

Also, less than 30% of South African mineworkers now come from foreign countries compared with double that percentage prior to the change of the Immigration Act in 2003, which prohibited the recruiting of foreign novices and only allowed foreign mineworkers with skills to be taken on.

In addition to recruitment, Teba is also working closely with government on a job fund subsidy and with various platinum producers to upskill local communities.

It also provides a number of financial services, sets out to ensure that those who have ceased working are paid the money they are owed by the respective funds and coordinates the social and labour plan development commitments of mining companies.

Edited by Creamer Media Reporter

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