JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Gold Fields has opted to negotiate outside of the traditional centralised bargaining format in clinching a three-year, 10%-a-year wage agreement at its fully mechanised, 3 500-employee South Deep gold mine, leaving the other five Chamber of Mines (CoM) gold mining companies to continue to adhere to centralised bargaining in the upcoming wage negotiations, which the Solidarity union warned would be South Africa’s toughest ever.

Simultaneously, the labour-intensive AngloGold Ashanti, Evander Gold Mines, Harmony, Sibanye Gold and Village Main Reef gold-mining companies, which collectively employ 94 000 mineworkers, acknowledged Gold Fields’ contrasting capital-intensive position, in announcing that their own pay discussions would take place in May/June, ahead of the expiry on June 31 of the current centralised collective wage deal.

Gold Fields said on Friday that the three-year agreement it had struck with the National Union of Mineworkers and the Uasa would result in average wage increases of 10% a year for three years at South Deep, its only South African operation west of Johannesburg, which is battling to break even.

The Gold Fields’ increase took effect on April 1, following company-level negotiations in recognition of South Deep’s mechanised operating model and South Africa’s scarce mechanised mining skills.

Meanwhile, trade union Solidarity gave notice of its intention to demand a 12% wage increase plus a lifting of the retirement age from 60 to 63, and in some cases to 65, in order to promote the retention of critical skills.

Solidarity general secretary Gideon du Plessis appealed to all parties at this year’s negotiations to balance the needs of employees with the survival of the mining industry.

“We are standing at a cross roads and it is in the best interests of everyone for this year’s negotiations to be peaceful and constructive,” said Du Plessis, adding that a linking of the wage offer by CoM to productivity could complicate matters.

Solidarity was not opposed to productivity linking in principle, provided it included a moratorium on retrenchments.

However, the union believed that attention to productivity improvement should have been given a long time ago, outside the formal negotiation process, as most employees were sceptical about the alleged benefits of productivity-linked wage proposals.