COMPANY COMMENT: SA miners tread softly around government
The local mining industry has realised that the policy of keeping its feelings restricted to talks behind closed doors has been an abject failure
While mining companies in SA in the past tended to use the softly-softly approach in their public utterances about the way they’ve been treated by the state for fear of being victimised or publicly attacked by government ministers and their allies in the National Union of Mineworkers, that does not appear to be the case when companies deal with the Australian authorities.It’s a telling difference when looking at the way companies respond to government proposals, particularly when companies fear being singled out for potentially damaging safety inspections and stoppages — as aired in court documents — and threatened with losing their mining rights as happened when Anglo American Platinum dared to say it wanted to cut 14,000 jobs the company’s its Rustenburg mines. However, the local industry has realised that this policy of keeping its comments and feelings restricted to talks behind closed doors and not letting the broader market and society fully know the implications of certain go...
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