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GOLD MINERS STRIKE

Some 12,000 workers at a gold mine operated by Gold Fields have gone on strike, in the latest industrial strife to hit South Africa's mining sector.

Julius Malema, the expelled leader of the youth wing of South Africa’s ruling African National Congress, will address Gold Fields Ltd. workers who started an illegal strike at the continent’s biggest gold-mining complex.

About 12,000 employees at the East section of Gold Fields’ Kloof-Driefontein operation started a strike on Aug. 29, demanding the immediate replacement of union branch leadership.

Illegal strikes have been spreading across South Africa’s mining industry after 44 people died in violence associated with a stoppage at Lonmin Plc’s Marikana mine in the North West province last month. Malema addressed miners at Lonmin after police shot dead 34 of the protesters gathered near the mine.

A decline in support for the National Union of Mineworkers, South Africa’s largest labor union, is opening space for other organizations to recruit, leading to unrest at operations and divided, protracted pay talks.
The KDC mines, which employed 26,685 workers including contractors last year, produced 1.1 million ounces of gold in 2011, or 31 percent of Gold Fields’ output. The East section produces 1,660 ounces of gold daily, spokesman Sven Lunsche said by phone on Aug. 31. This is the biggest unprotected stoppage Gold Fields has faced in at least three years.

“We’re not letting any outside political parties onto the property,” Lunsche said by phone today. “It could endanger the security of the mine in a very volatile situation.”
The South African political situation is destabilising an already fragile economy and this has led to the rand falling in value recently.
The mass of people in South Africa remain desperately poor including the lot of the miners, while improved since Apartheid times remains very tough.
There is a new corporate scramble for Africa's natural resources. Pundits predict that foreign investment in mining across the continent is set to increase by an astonishing 40 per cent this year and the top 40 mining companies in the world achieved record profits last year of $133 billion between them.

The World Bank and others continue to flag the mining industry in particular as the engine of Africa's future economic growth - the auditor Ernst & Young issued a report last year entitled "Africa: A Golden Opportunity".

Resource nationalism is an increasing response to this across the developing world and could result in the nationalisation of extractive industries in Africa and around the world.

Some fear that the stage is set for Resource Conflict 2.0 which could result in supply issues with regard to certain key commodities.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/gold-mines-in-south-africa-see-strikes-as-industrial-unrest-spreads-2012-9#ixzz25PwVhofy