All Sintobo* wants to do is to go back to work so he can finish building his house in the Eastern Cape and pay for medication for his sickly son. Sintobo and his comrades are not on strike, but since November 21 they have not been able to work at the Beatrix mine in the Free State, owned by Sibanye-Stillwater.
Sintobo is a member of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), which on November 15 signed a three-year wage deal with the company. Two other unions – Uasa and Solidarity – have accepted the deal. The three together represent 49% of the workforce at Sibanye’s gold operations.
The Association of Mineworkers & Construction Union (Amcu), which speaks for 43% of the 32,200-strong gold workforce, rejected the R700-a-month increase for the first two years of the deal, which will be followed by an R825 increment in the third year. The employees will also receive an additional R50 a month, R75 a month and R100 a month on the R2,150 monthly living-out allowance. These adjustments will take the guaranteed pay of entry-level employees to R14,900 a month in June 2021. Sibanye said “variable pay” would take this to more than R16,500 a month in three years.
Having mandated his NUM to accept the offer, Sintobo then set off for work as Amcu declared a dispute on the wage talks. But those who were on strike embarked on violent demonstrations.
The first week the company organised security and the police to accompany the buses of those who wanted to work. The route from the various mine compounds goes through a forest. Here some buses came under attack from people hiding in the bushes. Stones and some petrol bombs were thrown.
Sintobo has since left his room at the mine hostel and found a place to hide with other non-striking employees. Every day they must report to work, where they just “clock in” to earn their salaries.
In the first two weeks, some were able to go underground to work, but these days not enough people turn up to be able to work in their teams. Still, they must show they are not on strike in order to get paid.
A NUM member who was merely returning from Lesotho, was shot dead as he alighted from a taxi, probably mistaken for an igundwane (a rat), a name given to those coming from work. Another was hacked with pangas after jumping out of a taxi. A third man has been shot dead, said Sibanye.
Sintobo won’t go back home because he will miss out on his desperately needed wages if he can’t show he was not on strike. Such is the plight of those who want to exercise their democratic right to earn a living.
Amcu has been threatening to get its members on the platinum belt to join the strike in solidarity with their gold-mining counterparts. Should it do that, you can expect a lot more violence as the 70,000 workers on the platinum belt understand the pain of losing incomes to a strike only too well. They have not yet recovered from the five-month strike of 2014.
Of course the legislation allows for “sympathy strikes”. Still, only in SA do workers go on strike when they have no problem with their employer.
*Not his real name..