Ex-Implats CEO speaks out on strikes, mine conditions – by Christy Filen (Mineweb.com – October 1, 2012)

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In his first interview with Mineweb since leaving Impala Platinum, David Brown, hits back at critics accusing the company of starting the wave of strikes.

JOHANNESBURG (MINEWEB) – The former CEO of Impala Platinum, David Brown, has said that accusations that the miner had, while he was at the helm, kicked off the recent spate of wild-cat strikes by negotiating and settling with illegally striking workers is misplaced.

Brown said that the accusations are not accurate as nothing extra was given to striking workers until they had returned to work and there was normality.

In the CEO’s first interview since announcing his resignation from the platinum miner, Brown said “Well you can go back to Adam beget Cain, as to who started it, I think that they are missing the point. The point is that we all pay subtly different wages and benefits and that has been one of the issues”.

We saw Implats hurry up an annual increase to workers earlier on in the year after a violent six week strike in which three people died and then Lonmin agreeing to a 11% to 22% increase across the categories after a lengthy strike resulted in the deaths of 46 people and scores injured.

Implats has subsequently again given employees a 4.8% increase and the industry wide strike action has now spread to 17 mines across the country.

“One needs to break the cycle that we are seeing at the moment where Lonmin makes an increase, Impala makes an increase and is Anglo [American Platinum] going to make an increase? And then are we back again to Impala etc making increases again? I think that is probably one of the real worries” said Brown.

Brown, who is now the chairman of coal junior, Coal of Africa a company also dealing with strike action at its Mooiplaats operation, said that a centralised bargaining forum for the platinum sector would go some way to resolving the issue.

“I honestly believe that centralised bargaining will have a positive impact from the point of view that all companies are paying the same wages, the same benefits then effectively I think a lot of this play-off between the various mines will disappear” said Brown.

More importantly, Brown said that mining in the country had to be nurtured so that it could regain its place as the bedrock of the economy, calling for an open dialogue between unions, government and industry to discuss issues, particularly the above inflation cost increases for wages and electricity.

Although the recent increase in the platinum price and slight deterioration in the rand will help absorb some of the additional costs incurred, Brown said the platinum price was likely to slip again given that the fundamentals pointed to ‘significant demand destruction’ that had not yet recovered.

Brown also said that the issue of declining productivity levels needed to be raised saying that whenever this was discussed with unions “their eyes tend to glaze over.

The relationship between government and unions is also something that needs to be examined said Brown.

“It is very difficult to negotiate as a commercial concern with unions when there are political ramifications as well in terms of the tri-partite alliance and the linkage into government so I think that there is a need to re-look at those relationships to see whether those relationships are actually functioning optimally for the industry going forward” said the chairman.

For the rest of this article, please go to the Mineweb.com website: http://www.mineweb.com/mineweb/view/mineweb/en/page35?oid=159474&sn=Detail&pid=102055