Miners’ Strike, South Africa, 2012
Just recently one of largest mining companies here in South Africa, Sibanye Gold, announced that they will retrench 7,400 permanent workers and 3,000 contractors. The company had to stop its operations for a month because of a strike. Following this they dismissed 99 workers and placed 407 on final notice.
The C.E.O of the company released a statement: “The long-term sustainability of the group is our only focus and is necessary if we are to continue to deliver superior value to all our stakeholders.”
The statement says a lot about how little the bosses value us. They forget the most important thing: that workers’ labour is the source of all value, not the machines, but our labour power alone.
This week another company, Anglo Gold Ashanti, also said they will retrench 8,500 workers and this is just the tip of the iceberg. In the last 5 years, 100,000 workers have lost their jobs in the gold industry alone, excluding the recent announcement by Sibanye Gold and Anglo Gold respectively. I am convinced that other companies will follow these two. As a result thousands of families will go to bed without knowing what they are going to eat.
And this is why it is more important than ever for our party to win over these workers so that they can fight for a communist society where they do not work for the bosses’ profit but the needs of the working class as a whole. That is why we plan to bring Red Flag to these miners as soon as possible.
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