Chamber, NUM agree bilateral ahead of main wage talks
JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – In a departure from business-as-usual, the Chamber of Mines (CoM) had agreed to one-to-one discussions with the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) ahead of this year’s crucial main collective bargaining negotiations, CoM CEO Bheki Sibiya told Mining Weekly Online at the weekend.
Sibiya said that CoM had acceded to the request for a bilateral ahead of the main collective negotiations in response to a written request from NUM secretary-general Frans Baleni.
CoM’s bilateral pre-engagement with NUM would be followed by a multiparty pre-collective-bargaining engagement with the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), Solidarity, Uasa and NUM.
“We’re agreeable to all of these pre-engagements. We need to break way from ‘business-as-usual’ in our negotiations this year.
“We’re looking at the possibility of the one-to-one meeting with NUM next week and the pre-collective bargaining indaba within three weeks - the pressure being the need to start the main negotiations,” Sibiya said.
The main negotiations were expected to begin “in earnest” in the last week of June and then take their course.
“It will be thorough, more than expedient,” he said.
The underlying theme of NUM’s proposal was the perceived need to break away from a ‘business-as-usual’ approach in this year’s crucial negotiations, to manage high expectations.
NUM's demand of an entry-level minimum monthly wage of R7 000 for surface workers and R8 000 for underground workers in the gold mining industry equates to a 49% increase for surface workers, who currently earn an entry-level wage of R4 700 and a 60% hike on the R5 000 underground worker wage.
In calling for the bilateral, NUM was seen to be implicitly acknowledging the emergence of AMCU, which had become the majority platinum-sector union.
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