JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – South Africa-focused gold-mining company Sibanye Gold is negotiating new working shift arrangements with its labour unions to allow migrant workers to return home more frequently and simultaneously facilitate the sweating of assets by increasing the number of days worked a year.

The JSE- and NYSE-listed company, headed by CEO Neal Froneman, is also taking steps to introduce a profit share scheme for its 35 000 employees and giving consideration to bussing migrant workers home four times a year (see also attached video).

“It’s going to come at a cost but as Sibanye we are very willing and able to contribute to additional costs where it is going to have a meaningful improvement on the lives of our employees,” Froneman tells Mining Weekly Online in the attached video interview.

Sibanye’s initiative comes against the background of the Chamber of Mines’ Sindisa initiative.

South African gold mines currently operate only on 270 days out of the 365 days year compared with the global norm of 24 hours a day and seven days a week and is also grappling with serious social issues associated with migrant labour.

“Migrant labour in its own right is not a bad thing, as long as the social issues associated with it are addressed and the social issues are getting migrants back to their families in reasonable periods,” Froneman tells Mining Weekly Online in the attached video interview.

In the rest of the world, migrant miners in remote mining camps benefit from fly-in, fly-out arrangements, but because of the labour intensity of South Africa’s mines, the high costs of flying workers back to their families regularly is having to make way for other transport propositions.

With a new working-shift arrangement, Froneman believes Sibanye could increase the number of days worked from 270 to 320 a year.

As Sibanye will need more employees to accomplish that, a positive employment contribution can be made.

If the new working shifts can be arranged, he believes that migrant mineworkers could go home once a quarter instead of only once a year.

It is thus a potential a win-win for labour and for the mines, which will ditch discredited historical systems.

Plans are also afoot to cut mineworkers into the profits through gain share initiatives that reward employees in line with investors and management.

That means sharing in profit when they are up and tightening belts when they are down.

Sibanye has a training academy and a safe technology initiative, but does not envisage any technological quantum leaps.

“If you think of robots roaming around underground or even drones flying around like bats, we’re not there yet. It would be nice to get there in 20 to 30 years time, maybe.”

In the meantime, the company wants to make it much easier for mineworkers to drill and blast with the help of drill jigs and rigs that can operate in a low stoping-width environment.

A survey of the Sibanye workforce has indicated that the bulk of employees are between 30 and 40, a generation familiar with smartphones and iPads and the idea is to make the underground environment smart in the same way by incorporating some of that technology into drilling machines that use environmentally friendly hydropower.

More than 3 000 Sibanye employees have been put through a personal financial programme and institutions will be called in to consolidate their debt.

Sibanye has spent R700-million on hostel conversion, building houses and the company is accelerating a home-ownership programme that will use the living out allowance to pay for a bond, water, lights and rates and taxes in an affordable way.

Transformation education and training is ongoing through the Sibanye Academy and the budget for this year is R800-million.

The company is now also engaging directly with communities rather than only through municipalities.
Earlier this year, AngloGold Ashanti executive VP sustainability David Noko also made the point that shifts should be restructured to allow migrant mineworkers from distant areas to go home more frequently.

Noko is also of the view that migrancy, which he sees growing on his frequent trips to other mining destinations, should be retained but radically reformed.

“The challenge facing us in South Africa is our labour intensity. Our volumes are large but surely there is a solution somewhere through shift structures and quicker transport,” the former De Beers Consolidated Mines CEO says.

South Africa’s migrant mineworkers differ majorly from their world counterparts in that they are large in number, lowly paid and minimally educated, whereas global migrants are increasingly higher paid knowledge workers who generally benefit from fly-in, fly-out transport.

In contrast, South Africa’s migrants are hardly ever fully resident in the areas where they work and rarely present in the places they call home, with the current South African system of 11-shift fortnights and 12 days holiday a year seen as a  hugely negative factor.