NUM logo. (Image: supplied) 
The gold price has more than doubled over the past two years and recently scaled new record peaks above $4,300 an ounce – a state of affairs that should set the stage for tough wage talks with South Africa’s mining unions.
Indeed, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu), Uasa and Solidarity declared on 9 October a dispute with Sibanye-Stillwater’s gold unit when wage negotiations deadlocked.
The talks are now being mediated by the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA), and the unions have revised their demands. Sibanye is expected to respond on 29 October.
But what is striking about the union demands – given gold’s sparkling performance – is how moderate they are, especially when compared with the battle cries of the past.
This highlights how the militant edge of mining unions and class conflict in South Africa have been blunted by a range of factors, notably decades of above-inflation wage agreements and inflation’s moderation in recent years.
It all adds up to wage demands that are surprisingly reasonable – and one suspects affordable in the current price environment.
To wit, when the union talks with Sibanye deadlocked two weeks ago, the company was offering a 4.5% increase over the next three years.
The unions were demanding R1,500 wage hikes for the monthly package of category 4 to 8 miners – the lowest-paid category – and 8% each year for the more skilled groupings.
So there was a wide gap between the demands and the offer, but it was hardly on the scale of the depth of a Witwatersrand gold shaft.
NUM told me on Wednesday that the union demands had been revised down to R1,300 hikes for the lower-paid categories and 6.5% a year for officials, miners and artisans – a significant narrowing of the gap which suggests a strike is unlikely.
Compared with even the fairly recent past, such demands can hardly be portrayed as wild-eyed or unreasonable. I recall covering gold wage talks in 2015 when NUM’s opening demands included a 75% wage increase at a time when the precious metal’s price was falling.
That was typical of the era. In 2013, NUM’s opening demands in the gold mines were for wage increases of 60%, and Amcu’s demands were in a similar range.
Another big difference which has emerged in recent years is that the unions are presenting a united front. The first time this happened in a significant way was in 2021, when Harmony Gold inked a three-year wage deal with five unions.
Read more: Harmony Gold inks historic wage deal with five unions
This pointedly included NUM and Amcu, signalling the beginning of the end to their brutal turf war, which had killed scores of miners and unleashed waves of often violent labour unrest. The burying of the hatchet between the former arch rivals removed one of the biggest risk factors for investors in the sector.
The main reason for this taming of labour militancy is that the factors that gave rise to it in the first place have largely been addressed.
Rising wages, safer mines
Under apartheid, the wages of South African mineworkers for decades declined or stagnated. The price of gold until 1971 was fixed, and the only way to contain costs as the shafts sank deeper below the surface was to suppress wages.
This was largely done by ruthlessly exploiting a mostly migrant black labour force drawn from impoverished rural areas in the former homelands and neighbouring countries.
But in recent decades – and off an initially low base – the average wages of South African miners have soared at a faster rate than inflation, while working conditions have dramatically improved.
According to Minerals Council data, in 2001, the average annual remuneration paid to mine workers was R59,784. This includes not only the basic wage, but the whole pay package, including various allowances, health insurance, and bonuses. By 2010, that figure had risen to R149,000.
In 2024, according to the council’s latest Facts & Figures document, South Africa’s mining industry employed 474,876 workers and employee earnings amounted to R195.3-billion – an annual average of just over R411,000 – an almost seven-fold increase from 2001.
That obviously does not capture wide disparities in pay, but even the lowest-paid miners are much better off than they were a couple of decades ago. The Minerals Council says that the average remuneration for entry-level miners – including the entire package – amounts to R270,000 a year.
At Sibanye’s gold mines now, according to NUM, the monthly wage of surface category 4 to 8 workers ranges from R12,902 to R15,701. For underground employees in these categories, the range is R13,602 to R17,200.
This is an annual range of R154,824 to R206,400, but this is just the basic wage and not the whole package.
Health and safety
Huge strides have also been made on the health and safety front. In 2024, 42 miners were killed on the job in South Africa — a record low for a calendar year since the onset of industrial-scale mining. In the 1980s, when black lives hardly mattered in apartheid-era boardrooms, the annual death toll reached as high as 800.
Read more: South Africa’s mining industry sees historic safety improvements in 2024
A range of factors are behind these trends – the end of apartheid and union activism are big ones – but the bottom line is that South African miners are far better paid, enjoy better standards of living, and work in much safer conditions than they did a few decades ago.
Inflation, meanwhile, has significantly slowed and in September was a benign 3.4% on an annual basis. Sibanye’s offer of a 4.5% increase reflects the current inflation trajectory.
It’s also the case that much of the mining workforce has to feed many dependents, and so the inflation rate alone does not always shed light on their circumstances. With the unemployment rate on the rise, the burden on some miners is probably growing.
But overall, the historical forces which led to the formation of the NUM in the first place are no longer in play in 2025.
So we have a gold price at sky-high levels that recently would have been viewed as unthinkable, and yet South African mining unions are making reasonable demands that a few years ago would have been unthinkable.
This bodes well for platinum group metals (PGM) producers – which have also seen the price of their product surge of late – when their next round of wage talks takes place.
In such a market, the mining companies can hardly plead poverty, even while they also face rising costs beyond wages. But the unions – and this is testimony to their determination over the decades to secure fair mining wages – also cannot plead the poverty of their members any more.
This is the new normal in South Africa’s mining sector. It is surely no bad thing. DM