(en) Southern-Africa, Media: Anarchism fuels younger miners

SOME intriguing facts are emerging from the wildcat strikes sweeping the mining industry.
Notable among them is that the leaders appear to be fairly young, tolerably well educated
and reasonably fluent in English. ---- They are also, it seems, energetic followers of
former African National Congress Youth League president Julius Malema. And their
ideological belief appears to be rooted in anarchism, meaning in this case a general
opposition to authority or the organisation applied in the conduct of human affairs. This
is exactly what happened during the haphazard negotiations between the industry and the
hapless National Union of Mineworkers, which has been caught in the crossfire. ---- As
Gold Fields CEO Nick Holland observed during a media briefing on Tuesday, there is a clear
disconnect between the older generation of mineworkers, who are signalling a desire to get
back to work, and the younger breed who are having a fine time destroying assets,
attacking police stations, intimidating those who want to work, indulging in wanton
violence and murder, and creating a miasma of fear.

There is in addition, he said, a legacy issue between older mines where mechanisation is
less advanced and young mines, such as South Deep, where it is much better developed.
South Deep provides good opportunities for skilled and semi-skilled employees and that
mine has been unaffected (so far) by the wildcat strike virus.

Holland also said it is important for the mining industry to examine the strike syndrome
and learn lessons from it. He wants a forum to be established at which new strategies can
be thrashed out and refined. This puzzles me, because it?s reinventing the wheel. A
perfectly good forum, Mining Dialogues 360?, has been working hard for some time.

Operating under the auspices of the prestigious South African Institute of Mining and
Metallurgy, Mining Dialogues was first supported financially by Royal Bafokeng Holdings
and now receives funding from other companies such as Rio Tinto, Impala Platinum and
AngloGold Ashanti.

Meanwhile, Gold Fields is the first of the major gold houses to indicate its preparedness
to start dismissing employees who fail to report for work. About 15,000 of them have until
2pm today to comply. The 6,200 strikers at three shafts of Gold Fields? Beatrix mine in
the Free State have already returned to work.

No one should want a wholesale firing. While it may send an appropriate message about the
need for discipline and a proper assessment by employees of their own circumstances, the
thought of yet another 15,000 men (in addition to the 12,000 fired by Anglo American
Platinum) out of work ? and, by extension, the well-being of perhaps as many as
half-a-million dependents and workers in secondary industries ? compounds the problems of
an already fractured social contract.

Bron : A-infos-en@ainfos.ca