Sibanye-Stillwater has cut its Marikana workforce by 4,775 jobs, fewer than it flagged when it started the restructuring process late in 2019, but adding to SA’s growing ranks of unemployed.
Sibanye bought the financially distressed Lonmin, once the world’s third-largest platinum miner, for R4.3bn worth of shares in June 2019. In September, it said it would cut up to 5,270 jobs at the Lonmin assets, which included mines, concentrators, smelters and refineries.
On Thursday, Sibanye, now the world’s largest source of six platinum group metals (PGMs), said it had reduced the workforce at the assets collectively renamed Marikana by 4,775.
“We are pleased with the outcome of the consultations with stakeholders, which despite the necessary closure of some end of life shafts, resulted in the preservation of a number of jobs,” Sibanye CEO Neal Froneman said.
“This will result in a more sustainable business, which will secure employment for the majority of the Marikana workforce for a much longer period.”
Sibanye employs more than 80,000 people at its SA PGM and gold mines, with the PGM mines now employing 45,000 people after these job cuts. Marikana has 22,000 employees.
Sibanye has long argued that it had to reduce the size of the workforce at the unprofitable Marikana mines to ensure there was a long-term sustainable future for the assets.
However, the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu), the dominant union at the Marikana assets, has done all it can to prevent job cuts, trying unsuccessfully to block the Lonmin takeover through various legal mechanisms.
Rival union the National Union of Mineworkers expressed disappointment with the forced job cuts at Marikana that added to the country’s soaring unemployment, said spokesperson Livhuwani Mammburu.
One in three adult South Africans is unemployed and pressure is mounting on companies because of rolling blackouts as the state-owned electricity monopoly struggles to keep the country supplied with electricity from its ageing, ill-maintained power plants.
The NUM’s national executive committee will meet in late February and it could discuss formalising a call on the mining sector and organised labour to have an industry gathering to discuss the difficulties facing it with power cuts from Eskom and other headwinds, Mammburu said.
“Eskom is a massive problem. We must have an indaba (meeting) this year to figure out how the mining companies and unions can work together to deal with all these negative factors,” he said.
When the deal was unveiled at the end of 2017, then CEO of Lonmin Ben Magara said 12,000 jobs would have to be cut at the mines regardless of whether the Sibanye takeover went ahead or not. Lonmin removed about 6,000 jobs before Sibanye took over.
A decade-long downturn in the price of platinum, which is the dominant metal coming from SA’s PGM mines, meant companies such as Lonmin and its larger peer, Impala Platinum, were forced into restructuring.
PGM prices have improved on the whole, driven largely by palladium and rhodium prices, and the financial position of SA’s PGM miners has improved dramatically.
Sibanye has made it clear that the Lonmin assets still need restructuring to remove high embedded costs despite improved metal prices, positioning them to weather any future downturn in prices.
Of the job reductions unveiled on Thursday, 1,142 positions were cut by forced retrenchments and the termination of 1,709 contractor positions. A further 1,612 people opted for voluntary severance packages, with the balance coming from retirement and natural attrition.
Sibanye managed to temporarily avoid cutting 329 jobs by agreeing to extending reclamation work at Shaft 1B, which entails sweeping and vacuuming old working areas for blasted ore. This work will continue to the end of 2020.
These jobs would be preserved as long as “the projects continue to be profitable on a three-month average period”.
Sibanye transferred 166 employees to other positions within the company, bringing the total of staff affected by the restructuring to the original 5,270 number.
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