South African miners hospitalised after clash

Cape Town: Ten striking South African miners were taken to hospital on Tuesday after being hit by rubber bullets, police said, as labour strife swells in mines and factories ahead of mid-year pay negotiations.

Auto maker Mercedes-Benz said a two-day wildcat stoppage at its East London plant had ended but the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa (NUMSA) squashed any relief with an immediate demand for a 20 per cent pay rise.

“If our demands are not met, we will have no option but to go to the streets,” NUMSA national treasurer Mphumzi Maqungo told Reuters.

The comments underscored the fragility of labour relations in Africa’s biggest economy since last year’s bloody mining sector unrest, and pushed the rand beyond 9.50 to the dollar for the first time since early 2009.

The currency extended its two-week slide after police confirmed that security guards had fired rubber bullets at stone-throwing wildcat strikers at a chrome mine near the platinum belt town of Rustenburg, 120km northwest of Johannesburg.

The mining firm, Germany’s Laxness, said the guards had fired rubber bullets in self-defence into the ground in front of protesters. In a statement, it contradicted the police tally, saying only two miners had been hit, and three more injured in the commotion.

Wage negotiations

South Africa’s annual mid-year wage negotiations — known locally as “strike season” — normally start with lofty wage demands that are then whittled down to something slightly above inflation, now around 6 per cent.

However, the union-management choreography has been derailed by a vicious turf war between mining unions that spilled over into violence last year. Fifty people died, including 34 shot by police at the Marikana mine in the bloodiest security incident since the end of apartheid in 1994.

Even before Tuesday’s Laxness clash, the temperature was rising.

Last week, the platinum firm Lonmin suffered a wildcat walkout at Marikana shortly after an unknown gunman shot dead a senior union official in a bar, and the National Union of Mineworkers said it would push for a pay rise of a staggering 60 per cent for some categories of miners.

South Africa’s car makers saw minor labour disruptions in 2012 but investors fear a repeat of the wage-related strikes that crippled the sector in 2010 as the economy was struggling to emerge from recession.

Car industry bosses said they would not entertain NUMSA’s latest demands, setting the stage for a showdown when a three-year wage deal worth around 10 per cent a year expires at the end of next month.

“It is common cause that the employers will not settle at 20 per cent,” said Thapelo Molapo, chairman of the Automobile Manufacturing Employers’ Organisation.

Interest rate cut

The dramatic slide of around 6 per cent in the rand in the past two weeks is likely to stoke inflation, and has put paid to any hopes of a growth-boosting interest rate cut from the central bank at its two-monthly policy meeting on Thursday.

Rising prices, union turmoil and a limping economy — 2013 growth is forecast at 2.7 per cent — could yet damage the African National Congress (ANC) in an election due early next year, although there is little chance that it will lose its outright majority in parliament.

Mercedes said its strike related to a company investigation into work stoppages at its paint division, but the threat from NUMSA, with its 230,000 members, trumped any sense of relief for the company or foreign investors.