The Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) will march in four provinces against job losses in South Africa’s mining sector.
AMCU members, will on Tuesday, 20 March, march in at least four South African provinces against what the union calls a “jobs blood bath” in the mining sector.
At a press conference on Monday, 19 March, AMCU’s President Joseph Mathunjwa said AMCU had duly “filed a section 77 notice to the National Economic Development Labour Council with the Department of Mineral Resources (DMR) as the respondent. Section 77 of the LRA gives the right to trade union formations to engage in protected industrial action regarding socioeconomic matters, which are of broader public and class interest.”
Mathunjwa also took aim at the DMR, saying that there have been a “series of regulatory shortcomings on the side of the DMR.” He agues that “AMCU showed how these regulatory failures led to a variety of socio-economic ills such as unemployment, poverty and inequality in the South African society. These three core challenges, we argued, are made even worse by the mass retrenchments of the past years and specifically during the latter part of 2017.”
The union explains that the “mining sector, which employs an estimated 500 000 people, is not an exception to the jobs blood bath. The industry is currently facing a monster in the form of section 189 of the Labour Relations Act (LRA).”
“The section allows an employer to dismiss employees for operational requirements or reasons. A portion of subsection two stipulates that, “the employer and the other consulting parties must… engage in a meaningful joint consensus-seeking process and attempt to reach consensus on appropriate measures to avoid the dismissals [and] to minimise the number of dismissals. Yet, during the period 2012 to 2017, some 70 000 mineworkers lost their jobs”
The marches will be in Pretoria, Welkom, Durban and Polokwane and will start at 9 AM, ending in the afternoon with the delivery of a memorandum to the Minister of Mineral Resources, Gwede Mantashe, for the Pretoria march, while separate memoranda will be delivered to DMR offices in the other three provinces.