Metals Industry strike - my take

[desA]

ARNOLD GOLDSTONE: Well, Alec, you know a few years ago, we looked at the market in South Africa, and we nominated that South Africa was slowly de-industrialising and I was taken to task at the time – it was about three years ago – but that was our perception. We could notice a pervasive lack of competitiveness in the market. At the end of the day, we are competing with the rest of the world, whatever we manufacture in South Africa, so it became obvious to us that South Africa didn’t have the environment that would encourage competitive manufacturing, so we started looking abroad. We’ve publically stated we would like 50 percent of our income to be, generated from non-South African sources within five years. We are currently at about 22 percent of our revenue, coming from abroad, so we are fishing in international waters for the diversification that we want outside of South Africa.

Also, Invicta’s market is fairly limited in the country because we are relatively large, in whichever industry we operate in, which makes it difficult to make game changing acquisitions in our industries. There are competition commission restrictions that would prevent us from making the game changes here, so we embarked on this path some years ago. Perhaps a bit prophetic, sad for the country, unfortunately that we have a big industry, like the manufacturing industry, which is on a slow decline, so as a South African, it is very sad for me to be an observer.

An interesting perspective. Erosion of local purchasing power, combined with a de-industrialing society, is driving Invicta/BMG abroad.

[Faan]

In my opinion the future lies in small business. I am not convinced that there is much one can do about the present situation except at the polling station and I think we all know how that works. This however does not mean you have to stay away. Rather talk to the people working or reporting to you to go and vote when the opportunity arises.

We can complain as much as we like about what the unions are doing, but as an individual there is nothing you can do

By supporting small businesses we can grow the economy. We have to support each other. If at all possible buy from each other and if you do buy do not argue about a few cents in price and please pay. Do not get the seller to beg you for his money. Many people in good positions will at some point in the future be retrenched and that should not be the end of a career but the beginning of a new life. Help each other to find an opportunity.

The chances that you will be doing something on your own in a new business are minute and this will allow you to employ 1 or 2 or more people and in doing so create jobs and grow the economy.

On the forum we probably have a few people in the corporate world. I would advise them to start looking around for opportunities and if you are passionate about something investigate the possibility of creating a business out of it. I am a member of BNI and quite a number of the people in our chapter has been forced into doing something new and they are all successful in their businesses.

None of us in the forum will be able to do something about the union(s). Let us not put our energy into the unions, but rather on providing a better and more effective service or product to our customers.

[desA]

Time to form the "Formerly Advantaged, Now Totally Disadvantaged, Union"?

FANTDU

[Chatmaster]

Hi Guys

I have to agree with so many posts on here. It is completely crazy. I had a look at the way Africa in general is heading and where SA is sitting in that picture, and in my mind there is no doubt that we are heading where most of Africa has been already. The real problem here is that the entire picture is wrong. From the challenging prospect of just starting a business that can take months to the power that the unions have been given through legislation and political alliances. We need a complete review.

[IanF]

Where to start.
At the top but realistically there is no chance that with our current ANC, maybe if Cyril Ramaphosa becomes president then yes.

From what I understand there is no secret ballot for a strike vote Letter to Bday unions use tyranny once this happens then the power of the thugs is reduced.

Then we need to get the employees to have something worth losing so they want to protect it. That is get them into a middle class mindset. How business does this is the hard part for us.

Anyway my 5cents.

[adlomo]

I own a small business, with very few employees, I take care of my employees because they are the people who make money for me , without them I can't do anything. This is the reality that each and every employer should have, the employees don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. The living conditions of the miners in the platinum belt is a reflection of employees who are not cared for by their employers. I will be ashamed if my employees are living in shark's, because that is a demonstration of how they have been paid over a period of time. Which means their conditions has not been improving instead it has been deteriorating. The thing is when you hit the bottom there is nothing else you can lose because you have lost everything over the years, the only thing that can happen is that you must go up , therefore in this case the miners negotiate from the position of strength, that is why they are able to go on for months without a salary but they still survive. Have you ever asked yourself as to how do they survive for so many months without a salary? Can you and I survive a single month without an income? The so called investors over the years have been getting good returns on their investments, the big question is to what extent have they taken into account the plight of the workers I mean genuinely. It is a know fact that the rich are becoming richer and the poor are becoming poorer ,It is also common knowledge that nature does not allow imbalance,so if we think that this condition was to stay like this forever we will be fooling ourselves.Therefore when it happens let us not be quick to blame strikes, because they didn't just occur out of the blue, there were factors that led to it , and those factors could have been avoided,but very little was done about them. One more thing that has blinded the eyes of the investors in our country is greed, this greed has made them not to see the injustice that they were doing to their workers. Unfortunately the workers are starting to be intelligent, they are able to detect if the company can afford a certain level of increases and they stick to their demands. If I was the employer I wouldn't hesitate to ensure that the workers are taken care of by providing decent housing, bundled with other benefits like providing bursaries for the miners children, I am sure if things like these were in place it would have been very difficult for the miners to go strike

[desA]

The point at which apartheid no longer becomes the excuse for present circumstances, is the point from which true growth can occur.

The people of the country need to take ownership of the present situation & determine to make substantive changes.

[Newretailer]

I am going to put my neck out there and give my opinion because Dave asked us to. I agree that the EFF is probably behind the current strikes. What I think though, is that the ground is fertile for them as the workers are angry. I want to differentiate between small and larger businesses. I get that small businesses are not guilty of this as we tend to struggle to keep our head above the water.

If you look at the bigger picture, there is something so immoral about the current situation that something needs to be done. I am talking about directors of larger companies that award themselves obscene amounts of money. Doesn't the CEO of Lonman get something like 17 million annually? IMHO, no human being on earth is worth that much. He didn't start Lonman. He didn't do without to grow the company. He didn't work day in and day out for very long hours without a holiday to make sure the fledgling company grew. No, he went to varsity, did a good job in the work place and eventually landed up there. He deserves a lot more money than the lowest workers, but not that much more. I am using him as example. The same goes for almost every single listed company and government departments.

These obscene salaries need to stop. If I was government I would put a law in place that the highest paid person could not earn more than say 20 times more than the lowest earning person, private and government. I doubt that anyone of us are not already falling within that. I listened to another caller suggesting something like this on the John Robbie show. You know what his reply was? He knew many of these people and we cannot do that as there is competition amongst them as to who earn the most and it is a status symbol for them. If I was a lowly paid worker and I heard that, my blood would be boiling. Heck, I am not and my blood was boiling. We are having people living close to starvation on the one hand and on the other hand we have people with more money than they could ever, ever need.

They shouldn't only see if the mines can survive by paying their workers more. They should add to the equation what would happen if they paid top management less at the same time. A lot less.

We are all paying the price for what these greedy animals are doing. Whilst the top people decide their own salaries, it will not change without laws to control it. This greed has only manifested itself to this degree in the last 30 years or so. The gap didn't use to be so wide. Workers see how much the top people of listed companies are earning and they think it is the same for all companies, even small ones. So they go on strike because they cannot survive and smaller businesses are caught up in the crossfire.

I think it is time that we stop seeing workers as commodities to be milked for their labour because of large unemployment and start seeing them as human beings with rights that also need to live. I think it is time that the people at the top stop thinking they are godly and start realising they are not worth as much as they think they are.

As far as trade unions go, they are so out of hand and short sighted it is unbelievable. The ones at the top of the trade unions are as guilty of lining their pockets while people suffer as are the CEOs. It is clear that they care about money and power and nothing else. In the mean time the workers and small business are the ones suffering.

[Newretailer]

Also, if some kind of law was in place to control the gap between richest and poorest in a company, the need for trade unions would fall away.

[IanF]

ALEC HOGG: But it does appear as though there are other motivating factors. In fact, we did have the CEO of SEIFSA in the studio a bit earlier – Kaizer Nyatsumba – and in the discussions, he freely admitted that the economics of this kind of transaction are going to have consequences. Gerhard, getting back to your people and the guys that you employ (and clearly, you have been following very closely). If Andrew Goldstone from Invicta is accurate in that there were mobs of 100 or so heavily armed NUMSA members arriving at un-unionised operations to force the workers to not go to work, what do you think is going to happen tomorrow when your members start locking out those same NUMSA members who want to come back to work?

GERHARD PAPENFUS: Well, I don’t know. What I do know is that you cannot succumb to this. What has happened in this strike…this wasn’t actually negotiations. It was a form of blackmail. That’s what you do. You engage in strike action, intimidation, and violence to such an extent that you force companies to stop operation. If it weren’t for this kind of action, the strike would have failed. There wasn’t sufficient popular support for the strike, so they have to engage in violence and intimidation. The problem is that by succumbing to this, we are setting the tone for future negotiations. NUMSA has seen this. This is the deal. We demand. Go and strike. We negotiate with the big guys. They make the deals and they make the easier deals. I’m not saying that this was an easy deal. This was a hard deal, but that is not our deal. Our deal is even more difficult.

It’s creating a very dim future for this industry and that didn’t happen now. It happened over years. This industry has lost 700,000 jobs in the last 30 years. NUMSA said at the outset of these negotiations, that the industry lost 250,000 jobs in the last five years. Seven hundred over the last 30 years…in terms of employment numbers, we’re back at 1972. We can see where we’re going. In fact, as we said at the negotiations table, if SEIFSA’s top company sends me an email, it says the way this is going – in ten years’ time there will be no metal industry left. He’s one of the guys who’s signing the deal now.

ALEC HOGG: It’s extraordinary. NEASA’s Chief Executive Gerhard Papenfus, putting a lot on the table. If you’ve been watching this program from the outset, we did talk to Wilhelm Hertzog from RECM at the top of the program who was giving us the view that perhaps this is in the interests of the big employers because it shakes out the weak and who are the weak, but the smaller companies.

From biznews.com interview

If true how do you get workers to stand up to the intimidation?