The indefinite wage strike at Sibanye-Stillwater’s gold operations is in full swing after members affiliated to the two biggest unions downed tools during the night shift on Wednesday in support of their demands for above-inflation pay increases.
Sibanye responded swiftly to the industrial action by closing down its gold operations and implementing a lockout, which the company’s two smaller unions said they would challenge in court.
In a statement on Thursday evening, Sibanye said it had given notice to the coalition of unions that it will be implement a lockout at its gold operations from 10pm on Thursday.
“The lockout will affect all employees who form part of the bargaining unit which include category 4 to 8 [underground and surface] employees and miners, artisans and officials belonging to the aforementioned unions.
“The lockout will remain in place until the final wage offer which was tabled on February 4 2022 is accepted by the unions that represent the majority of employees in the bargaining unit,” the statement read.
The lockout will not affect employees providing “priority services”, and the principle of no work, no pay will apply to striking employees and locked-out members of the bargaining units of the coalition unions, Sibanye said.
Earlier on Thursday, National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) spokesperson Livhuwani Mammburu told Business Day: “The strike is in full swing. The workers are demonstrating outside picketing areas that have been agreed on by management, the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA), and the unions.”
A protracted strike risks depriving Sibanye of an opportunity to take advantage of a gold price that has surged above $2,000/oz, reaching the highest since August 2020.
Sibanye’s gold operations account for about 7% of group profit and employ about 31,000 workers.
Mammburu said most of the striking workers were at Sibanye’s Driefontein mine in Carletonville and the Kloof mine in Westonaria, west of Johannesburg.
United Association of SA (Uasa), Solidarity, NUM and the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu) had been negotiating with the company for nearly a year as a coalition, demanding an increase of R1,000 a month, or 6%, which is above the 4.9% inflation rate the SA Reserve Bank has forecast for 2022.
Solidarity, however, later broke ranks with the coalition and accepted the company’s revised pay offer that will see surface and underground workers getting a R700 pay rise and a R100 increase in the living-out allowance each year for three years, and a 5% pay increase for artisans, miners and officials over the course of the multiyear agreement.
Uasa, meanwhile, was still locked in CCMA-facilitated talks with management aimed at reaching common ground and breaking the wage impasse, despite Sibanye having stressed that its revised wage offer was final and that employees would gain “little to nothing” from the strike.
On Wednesday, Solidarity and Uasa said they would mount legal action to challenge Sibanye’s lockout decision.
Sibanye-Stillwater spokesperson James Wellsted told Business Day on Thursday that the company will “obviously oppose that”.
“The fact is that the unions have been negotiating as a coalition for the last nine months. Now all of a sudden, there is an intent from them to suddenly break up the coalition. We still believe that we are negotiating with a coalition and we are treating it as such, so hence the lockout to all members of the unions that make up that coalition,” said Wellsted.
“In terms of the [strike’s] impact on gold [production], it’s hard to say. We were forecasting about 813,000oz to 870,000oz of gold for the year. I can’t give exact details yet, we will have to see as the strike progresses.”
Wellsted has said contingency plans in the event of a strike included implementing a lockdown, shutting down the gold operations and stopping ventilation of underground shafts. “That’s a huge part of the cost of electricity, ventilating the workplace to ensure the environment is safe to work in ... that way, they can be on strike for years and it would not impact too heavily on us.”
Amcu’s five-month strike from November 2018 at Sibanye’s gold operations cost the company R1.6bn and lost production of 110,000oz of gold, while nine people died. Workers forfeited R1.5bn in pay during the industrial action that saw Amcu eventually accepting terms that had been accepted by NUM, Solidarity and Uasa.
Update: March 10 2022
This article has been updated with Sibanye’s lockout notice.
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