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The platinum strikes may seem a distant memory to those not working in the industry. While the companies figure out how they’re going to cover the losses and the high increases, work is underway to address some of the underlying causes of the unrest, such as housing. Little has been done, but this could be the year that changes it all.
Thumeka Maswanoqana stood to tell her story of Wonderkop, Marikana.
“There are no proper structures or buildings. There is no water, no electricity,” the Sikala Sonke Women’s Organisation member told the Marikana Commission. “People use pit toilets. It is very difficult. When it’s raining – as we’re in shacks – when it’s raining the workers will stand on top of their beds … These workers work under difficult circumstances, but they are staying in very unbearable places.
“Their lives was supposed to be easy [but] even the people who died during the strike asking for more pay don’t have houses,” said Maswanoqana, speaking in April at Wits University. “We are living under difficult circumstances. Right now during this strike the poverty in Marikana is very bad.”
After this year’s five-month strike at Anglo American Platinum (Amplats), Lonmin, and Impala Platinum (Implats), it was clear discontent among mineworkers went beyond just wage issues.
Miners work long hours in difficult conditions, sometimes risking their lives. They face the possibility of disease. Like their fathers, they toil to make the elite rich while they send remittances back home. Meanwhile, they spend most of the year in areas like the informal settlements of Marikana, places where lives are built, men are made and friendships are won and lost, but are, generally, shitholes – shack-strewn, pothole-ridden, dusty enclaves where services are almost non-existent.
The strike is over. The workers got decent increases, but if non-wage related issues such as housing aren’t dealt with, we’re due to see continued strike action and militancy in the mining sector.
Reviewing 2012 in its 2013 annual report, Implats said the unrest goes deeper than issues between unions and management or a breakdown in communication between workers and the bosses. It relates to the social problems left over from the migrant labour system. The first problem Implats listed was housing.
During Apartheid, black mineworkers were required to stay in crowded hostels and were viewed as temporary residents from the homelands or abroad. The hostels were symbols of oppression and fed militancy and violence.
Since then, the number of workers living in hostels has reduced as companies have offered living-out allowances, paying workers similar amounts to what it cost to company to house them so they could stay nearby the mine. While the hostel system was a blight on society, the living-out allowances have had an unintended result: informal settlements have flourished, leading to employees and non-employees residing by the mines in unplanned shantytowns without services. Mining companies are required to upgrade their hostels, but the informal settlements are largely neglected.
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