S. Africa Miners to Vote on Limited Offer

Striking black miners reopened negotiations Tuesday with the South African Chamber of Mines but were told that the mining companies will not increase their offer on pay, the main issue in the two-week-old strike, but only on benefits.

Cyril Ramaphosa, the general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers, said the company’s tough, take-it-or-leave-it proposal will be put to the strikers today for acceptance or rejection. He said that continuation of the strike, the biggest in South African history, will depend on their decision.

Although Ramaphosa would not say what the union leaders will recommend, he did not hide his disappointment with the companies’ refusal in four hours of talks Tuesday to move beyond their previous pay offer, which the union firmly rejected last month. In reopening the negotiations, he said, the union had believed that wages would be discussed.

‘Prepared to Hold Out’

“Our members are showing unprecedented determination,” he told a news conference. “They are prepared to hold out for as long as it takes. They are saying they have lost too much to go back for this. But the members will have to make the decision, not the negotiating team, not the union leadership.”

The mining companies offered wage increases ranging from 15% to 23% and put them into effect unilaterally last month. Since then they have refused to discuss the question. The union had been asking for an across-the-board increase of 30% but on Tuesday reduced its demand in the hope that the companies would also compromise.

The decision on whether to accept the companies’ offer of improved benefits but no further increase in wages will be difficult for the union, and it could affect negotiating patterns in the mining and other industries for years to come.

The National Union of Mineworkers began the strike Aug. 9 not only for higher pay but also to demonstrate its growing strength and to demand that the Chamber of Mines negotiate with the union as an equal in the future.

Union’s Power at Stake

If the strike collapses, with labor’s demands largely unmet, the union’s bargaining power--and that of other black unions--will be significantly diminished.

The companies said Tuesday that “substantial” numbers of miners, threatened with dismissal, had already returned to work. The companies were clearly betting that a slightly better offer on benefits, along with already implemented wage increases, would end the strike. About 11,000 miners have already been fired, and more than 30,000 others are facing dismissal unless they return to work today or Thursday.

But Ramaphosa insisted that for the most part the strike is holding and that the majority of miners are more determined than ever. The union said more than 340,000 of the country’s 600,000 black miners went on strike originally; the Chamber of Mines put the peak figure at 232,000, but conceded that production at one-third of South Africa’s gold and coal mines had been virtually halted.

Johann Liebenberg, the Chamber of Mines’ chief negotiator, said the companies are willing to double the death benefits paid to the families of workers killed in mine accidents, so that they would receive four years’ pay. The death benefits fund is financed by both the companies and workers; the union had sought five years’ pay for a deceased miner’s family.

The companies are also willing, Liebenberg said, to increase the annual bonus paid black workers before they go on leave, but they have not agreed to the union demand for an increase in paid vacation to 30 days a year, the same as white miners receive.

Both sides are hurting--the strikers, who have now lost more than two weeks’ pay and have no strike fund and little savings to fall back on, and the companies, which have now, by one estimate, lost more than $95 million in revenue, or about what the additional pay increases and benefits sought by the union would have cost for a year.