20,000 Black Miners Fired for Striking in South Africa

Twenty thousand black miners were fired Monday at three of South Africa’s largest platinum mines, and 10,000 more were threatened with dismissal today if they continue a strike begun a week ago.

Impala Platinum Holdings Ltd., the West’s second-largest platinum producer, said work had come to a virtual halt over the weekend at all four of its mines and its processing plant in Bophuthatswana, one of South Africa’s nominally independent tribal homelands. It said that only a few hundred miners continued on the job.

The firings constitute the largest mass dismissal of black workers here in recent years and represent a direct challenge to the emerging political ambitions of the National Union of Mineworkers and other black labor unions.

Gary Maude, Impala’s acting chief executive officer, told reporters that the company decided to fire the strikers because it found their demands for pay increases “far too high” and their calls for improved working conditions and stricter safety standards “expensive and unreasonable in current circumstances.”

But Maude and other Impala officials did not hide the company’s intention of preventing the unionization of the platinum miners and dealing a major blow to the National Union of Mineworkers, whose Bophuthatswana affiliate claims to represent most of the 30,000 miners involved. The company has refused to recognize the union although the miners’ support of the strike is beyond dispute.

“We would like to be able to deal with a representative trade union,” Maude said. He accused the National Union of Mineworkers, the largest black labor union in South Africa, of “not truly representing the will of the workers” and of “being a lot more interested in politicking than negotiating.”

Impala’s parent company, General Mining Union Corp., prides itself on toughness in labor negotiations and has boasted about its ability to keep wage increases to a minimum. Four months ago, it fired about 1,200 striking gold miners, also members of the National Union of Mineworkers. However, it was forced to reinstate them when the union took the case to court, accusing the company of unfair labor practices, and won.

The union, which claims more than 160,000 dues-paying members, said later Monday that it is deciding on a strategy to get the fired workers reinstated at the Impala mines and to reopen wage negotiations with Gencor, as the parent company is known.

Gencor, the union said, is “despicably hiding behind the fact that Bophuthatswana has banned the National Union of Mineworkers and other South African trade unions” from its territory.

With nominal independence from South Africa as the tribal homeland for the Tswana people, Bophuthatswana has enacted a different, much more stringent, set of labor regulations. It also prohibits South African unions from establishing local branches there, insisting that there be only autonomous affiliations.

Maude said new workers will be hired immediately to replace all the dismissed miners, and he predicted that Impala will be back in production within two weeks.

High Unemployment

Company officials added that Gencor will try to ensure, through the South African Chamber of Mines, that none of the fired workers is hired by other mines. With unemployment at record levels, even in the mining industry, Gencor appears likely to succeed in both efforts.

Impala miners earn about $100 to $120 a month at top scale, plus room and board, according to union officials.

Impala produces 35% to 40% of South Africa’s platinum, and South Africa in turn supplies about 60% of the world’s platinum needs, according to metals specialists here. The other major producing country is the Soviet Union.

A high-priced metal, platinum is increasingly used in high technology, ranging from weapons systems to catalytic converters for automobile exhausts, as well as in watches and jewelry.

Unrest Continues

In South Africa’s continuing civil unrest, a black man was killed, the apparent victim of black militants who suspected him of cooperating with the minority white government. Police in Cape Town reported that they found the man’s body, burned beyond recognition, in a garbage dump in Guguletu, one of the black ghetto townships outside the city.

Militant youths, known as the “Comrades,” and more conservative older blacks, called the “Fathers,” have been feuding there for the past week.

Police headquarters in Pretoria reported widespread incidents of arson, stone-throwing and other unrest around the country Monday, but no other deaths.

At the University of the Western Cape, a school for Coloreds (people of mixed race) outside Cape Town, students refused to take examinations and tore up test papers, demanding that the examinations be postponed until several political issues are settled.

At Randfontein and Krugersdorp, west of Johannesburg, a boycott of buses called by black militants prevented thousands of workers from getting to their jobs Monday. Police intervened several times, firing tear gas, in an effort to drive the “crowds of intimidators” from the bus terminals.