Thinking back a year to the tragedy of Marikana on August 16 last year, it’s easy to lose track of what actually happened, weighted down by competing, complex and often inconsistent politicised narratives blaming politics, individuals, systems, culture and more. Let’s start by remembering that 34 people died on that day, and 44 overall during that period.
Even now, when talking to various different departments in the government, industry and civil society, I still get widely differing accounts of what happened and why. I don’t believe the government truly knows, given the multitude of lines it takes, while the Farlam commission seems set to run and run (it should have been concluded swiftly within nine months so as to be out of the way before the new wage round).
We need to separate out two issues around the Marikana tragedy: why was there a loss of life, and why were there protests? These two factors have too often been melded in the press over the past year, but they are separate.
Miners were not striking because of instructions to police from political connections, nor were they killed because of housing, debt or Julius Malema.
Investors are interested in both issues, but since the first is the realm of the Farlam commission, I want to look at particularly what motivated the strikes, why things turned violent, and what we can say about the outlook for the labour market from a foreign investor point of view.
For me, there are two “buckets” of reasons the Marikana strikes occurred. The first are causal and fundamental, the second catalysts and peripheral. In the first bucket are the issues of trust in traditional union management and frameworks, the tripartite alliance and company and industry wage negotiating structures that have divorced the process from the worker on the bottom line. Also in this bucket are housing conditions and the migrant labour system, including the dual family issue.
Put simply, the fact that some aspects of mining labour are barely changed from the days of apartheid is the other fundamental cause. This in turn created the secondary issue of unsecured credit and over-indebtedness, but that is a catalyst not a cause in my book.
Nor do I believe inequality in and of itself is a causal factor – under the right housing and migrant labour system, I believe the strikes could have been avoided even with similar inequality. At best, inequality is a catalyst.
Other catalysts, in my view, included a greater acceptance of the use of violence that we saw from the second half of 2011 in both service delivery and labour market protests, the insertion of adjudicating political and union factors including the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu) in its hunt for membership and Julius Malema, as well as some of the forces that have now formed the Workers and Socialist Party. It is important for investors to realise that Amcu did not cause the strikes but was merely a facilitating catalyst at the time.
Even now, Amcu’s ability to manage its network of members is less than certain. In the past year a number of themes have been cemented in the labour market, particularly in the mining industry, but that have their roots even before Marikana.
First, labour seems to have become increasingly disaggregated – both with new unions like Amcu coming along, and with strike action across a range of sectors being increasingly led from the ground by localised groups of workers who are operating only in the very loosest sense within a union structure.
Second, the wage cycle has taken on a more structural tone this year – that is, it is less about “we want x percent increases on last year” than “we need to be paid Rxxxx minimum”.
This raises significant competitiveness challenges, particularly given the current state of the mining sector but also for the economy more generally.
Given the determination of the demands and the underlying issues in many of these mining companies (as well as issues in other industries), it remains difficult to see an easy way out without more strike action, output loss, low levels of inward investment and violence.
The one positive is that the amount of violence and strike action has been quite low so far this winter – a sign of Amcu and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) taking the official routes on wages seriously to establish credibility and given the complexity of the more structural nature of this wage round mentioned above. But this does not really change the end point.
The government has regrettably shown a lack of real leadership on this issue – it has offered talking shops and declarations but no real policy action or movement on addressing fundamental, but difficult, issues such as reform of the migrant and dual-family labour systems or the fact that the structure of unionisation at a mine shaft and company level up to the use of collective bargaining is creating serious issues of disenfranchisement together with a lack of competition in the mining labour market.
The government, to my mind, remains conflicted by a web of tenderpreneurship, empowerment and other linkages with the ANC – not to mention the tripartite alliance and the NUM’s dwindling membership base and standing in Cosatu. The government appears to be too conflicted to be able to move much on the policy issues.
Of course, on the other side of the political debate it is still being challenged by the forces demanding greater resource nationalism. Within all this the Department for Mineral Resources seems to be stuck between the rock of the ANC and the government’s real-politik and its (and the minister’s) more natural sympathy with the plight of the mining companies and foreign investment.
For all these reasons, and lack of action, we still see the mining situation as coming to a head in the two years after the election – given everything is on hold until after that event next year. This is why we still believe some 122 000 jobs are at risk in the platinum sector alone by the end of 2015. And it is why we still think violence and strike action will keep bubbling up.
Until there is a fundamental understanding of the causal, deep, roots of the events at Marikana and the government has the political room to do something about it, it’s hard to say the lessons of a year ago have been learnt.
* Peter Attard Montalto is the emerging markets economist at Nomura International investment bank in London.
** The opinions expressed here do not necessarily represent those of Independent Newspapers.