JCI mine-workers put more demands

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FOR BREAD-WINNERS: Workers belonging to JCI Mining are on strike at the Nkomati Mine in Badplaas and Machardodop. FILE PICTURE BY Mining Safety

Workers belonging to the JCI mining group between Badplaas and Machardodorp in Mpumalanga have chosen to go to war than accept what they say are “unfair wages”.

The JCI mining company is a sub-contractor under the main contractor Aveng Moolman group for the Komati Mine, partly owned by Sundowns boss Patrice Motsepe’s African Rainbow Mineral and Russian owned Norilsk Nickel.

The company owned by the two is the Nkomati Mine and the Nkomati Mine employs Aveng Moolman to “mine overburden and ore”.

“Moolman is providing a full mining service [to Nkomati Mine] which includes bush clearing, top soil stripping, drilling, blasting, haulage of ore and waste, and rehandling operations, and the mining fleet comprises of excavators, dumptrucks,” the Moolmans group said.

Then at the Nkomati mine in the Badplaas and Machardodorp area, the Moolman group employs JCI Mining as its sub-contractor to do the work on behalf of African Rainbow Mineral and Norilsk Nickel.

This week workers at the mine shut down shafts and threatened to go on strike if JCI bosses didn’t come to meet them half way on the negotiating table.

Branch chairman of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union, who is also a branch leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters in the Badplaas area, Comfort Ngwenya, said they were picketing outside Nkomati Mine yards on Wednesday and have refused to work since Monday this week.

“We first complained about unfair wages but now we have applied to CCMA and we were granted a certificate and we put more demands,” Ngwenya said on Tuesday.

He said they now want JCI bosses to consider the issue of medical aid “because the mine is asbestos hazardous and we take the dirt home. So if we are sick or our children are sick we not gonna be able to get medical help”.

He said JCI mining paid other workers R27 an hour and others “on the condition of favouritism” are given R39 an hour.

“We want equal pay for equal job. Others who operate the B35 get more money than us but B35 machine is smaller than the B40 which the lowest-paid workers get.

“So we want him to address that and we want a 10% increase, which he agreed he would offer, but we said ‘no’. We don’t want a 10% increase under the current conditions of unfair distributions of pay. If they address our demand of equal pay for equal work, we accept the 10% and anything won’t be fair,” he said.

He said soon after workers blocked the routes to the mine and threatened to shut down shafts, JCI boss Mathews Abraham came and gave them a court interdict, not to disrupt productions at the mine.

“We respected that and now Nkomati Mine and Moolmans workers have resumed but all 70 of us JCI workers have been picketing here for him to come and talk to us,” Ngwenya said, adding they also want the mine to add the production bonuses and the 13th cheque, “but the employer has refused and said he would give us a 13% and according to our understanding that’s not a 13th cheque. A 13th cheque is 100%,” he said.

JCI’s Mathews Abraham told the 013NEWS reporter on Wednesday he doesn’t put this “in the public domain”.

He said: “These are Amcu workers and we don’t talk to them in the public domain, so no comment.”

(edited by ZK)

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