Labour has embraced the introduction of mechanised mining at Royal Bafokeng Platinum’s (RBPlat’s) Styldrift project, says RBPlat CEO Steve Phiri.

Phiri, who spoke to Mining Weekly in a video interview, says the company’s workforce understands that mechanisation is essential for the project’s optimisation.

Of JSE-listed RBPlat’s 6 213 employees, just over 70% are members of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), 25% are members of Uasa and the rest are not unionised.

The black-owned and black-controlled RBPlat last year managed to clip more than R400-million off the capital expenditure (capex) required for the expanded R11.39-billion Styldrift growth project, which is destined to be a high-powered 4 000-employee operation, with mechanisation reducing costs exponentially.

The Styldrift reef, which is 2 m thick in parts and considerably uniform, lends itself to mechanised bord-and-pillar mining and the optimisation exercise, in fact, added 1 000 jobs to the initially envisaged labour complement of 3 000.

“The advantage we have, and I’ve got to say it again, is that we’ve got a very strong, fairly educated union leadership that can understand technological, financial and leadership issues quite well.

You can sit down with them and say this is the strategy; this is the business plan; do you have an input? and they grasp the issues quite quickly,” Phiri told Mining Weekly.

Technological innovation is also being embraced at RBPlat’s conventional, labour- intensive Bafokeng Rasimone Platinum Mine (BRPM), especially when it comes to safety.

The BRPM workforce put in a stint during the platinum belt’s horrific recent five-month strike that saw overall labour productivity improve 3% to 31 t per employee costed and stoping efficiencies rise 5% to 325 m2 per crew, which was helped by employees volunteering to work on public holidays.