JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – South Africa’s gold mining industry needed to undergo a structural shift and significant modernisation to curb the socioeconomic pressures it was facing and to create a sustainable, uninterrupted operating environment, South Africa’s gold miners have stated.

In the latest update from their ‘This is Gold’ website, they noted that, by 2025, the country’s gold output would fall to 69 t, or one-half of current levels. This could potentially result in employment decreasing by 43% to 68 000 employees over the next decade.

While employee numbers had continued to decline in recent years, wages paid – in total and on average – had risen significantly.

In fact, average labour remuneration had risen by 11%  a year over the past decade. On average, guaranteed pay for gold mine employees had risen to R13 435 a month in 2012 versus R10 972 a month in 2010.

The gold miners believed that human, physical and financial resources also needed to be optimally applied in the industry.

“Continued decline of our sector can be avoided if industry stakeholders work together to reconcile short-term gains of the various parties with medium-term competitiveness and long-term sustainability,” they stated.

Even more concerning for the companies was that productivity had declined, as a result of the increasing depth of operations, continued declines in productivity measures per employee and the exhaustion of orebodies.

“With increased travelling times for workers to operating faces, the actual amount of time spent on generating productive blasts has diminished and, while competitors in other countries are productive for 365 days in the year, South African firms are only productive for approximately 274 days, which is 24.9% less productive days.

“Innovative ways of increasing the number of days where productive activity can take place are a vitally important area for focus in the wage discussions,” the miners stated.

The companies and unions would soon start wage negotiations for the gold sector.