JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – South Africa’s three biggest platinum-mining companies will resume a Ministerial meeting on Thursday after considering the latest unpublished wage proposal of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU).

New Mineral Resources Minister Advocate Ngoako Ramatlhodi said AMCU had presented the proposal at a meeting on Wednesday, which the heads of platinum mining companies Anglo American Platinum (Amplats), Impala Platinum and Lonmin had requested time to consider before resuming the meeting today.

The Minister has been engaging AMCU every day this week as part of an ongoing consultative process to resolve the current impasse in wage negations in the Rustenburg platinum belt, where 80 000 mineworkers have been on strike since January 23.

Deputy Labour Minister Phathekile Holomisa and Deputy Mineral Resources Minister Godfrey Oliphant were also in attendance on Wednesday.

The platinum-mining industry is giving nothing away at this stage of the prolonged strike, which has been marred by gruesome murder and intimidation.

The Catholic Bishop of Rustenburg, the Right Reverend Kevin Dowling, this week made an impassioned plea for the protection of vulnerable people and children in the violent platinum belt and decried the notion of violence and intimidation being part of a strategy to force a settlement.

Dowling said recent beheadings had gone unreported in the media and spoke of emaciated miners, too afraid to go to ask mines for their antiretroviral drugs, arriving at the Catholic clinic hungry.

Ramatlhodi expressed the hope to Reuters that the 19-week-old strike would be resolved before the end of this week, when the reaction of the platinum-mining companies to the latest unpublished AMCU proposal is expected to emerge.

AMCU president Joseph Mathunjwa has been quoted as saying that the latest round of talks had gone “well".

However, the union wants R12 500 rand a month as a basic minimum wage to be achieved in four years and has already cost employees R9.3-billion in lost earnings.

Companies, which are out of pocket R20.9-billion in lost revenues, have resisted the R12 500 minimum wage as being a threat to the sustainability of their businesses.

The three big platinum producers are offering between 7.5% and 10% at the lowest level, which though above inflation, is regarded as affordable.

For Amplats alone, the very lowest offer means an increase in wages of R4.5-billion year-on-year, on top of a current debt level that has risen from R10.5-billion at the beginning of 2013 to R13-billion last month.

“If we were to add R4.5-billion of debt on to that, we would stop this company within a year or two and that clearly cannot be to the long-term benefit of all of the employees that work for us,” Amplats CEO Chris Griffith told Radio 702 last month.