Page 48 - 100 years of Anglo American

t might soon slip from memory that
Anglo American was, until fairly
recently, the largest single private
sector employer in the country.
Its gold mines alone employed
I200 000 people in the late 1980s.
However, the latest wave of divestments and
restructuring it announced in recent years,
means that Anglo American’s position at the
centre of new developments on the mining
labour front has changed.
For much of the 20th century, the mining
industry was central to South Africa’s
migrant labour system, organised around far-
flung “labour sending areas” and hostel
compounds on the mines.
It was a system premised on low wages
for black workers on short-term annual
contracts, who lived in hostels and faced
extreme danger underground.
The proportion of non-South African
migrant workers in South Africa’s mines
reached a high of 80% in 1973.
Since the 1970s, Anglo American has been
a pioneer in dismantling that system. By the
end of 2014, the company had fully
converted all traditional mining hostels into Mine workers wait to board a lift to take them underground at an Anglo American
single or family units. The labour force that Platinum mine in Rustenburg three years ago. At the time, South Africa’s platinum
remains in South Africa is also biased industry was hit hard by a five-month-long strike in the sector organised by the
towards mechanised mining. But before this Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union
structural shift, Anglo American did a lot to
clean up the industry’s legacy. The labour
In the mining industry, it is widely
believed that the National Union of
To paraphrase historian Dunbar Moodie, in LEGACY
Mineworkers (NUM) would not have become
such a formidable force in the 1980s if not
for Anglo American’s then noteworthy
decision to allow unionists access to the
group’s hostels.

the 1980s, the South African mining houses
split into identifiable groups, with Anglo
American leading a relatively liberal Anglo American has been central to major labour
approach to the new black trade unions of events in South Africa, writes Dewald van Rensburg
the time, while certain rivals were associated
with a harsher strategy of containment and
exclusion. and Construction Union (Amcu). cost of production – a provisional R1.3 billion.
Managers at the rock face were not To better manage the mining industry’s This follows one of Anglo American’s most
always receptive to the spirit that had taken safety record, in 2008, through a partnership universally celebrated decisions to provide
hold at Anglo American’s headquarters at 44 between Anglo American, labour antiretrovirals to all HIV-positive employees
Main Street, which was personified by two organisations and the department of mineral in 2002 – two years before the government
people in particular – Alex Boraine and resources, the Tripartite Health and Safety finally abandoned its denialist stance.
Bobby Godsell, who advocated for the right Initiative was launched. Another distinctive feature of mine labour
to organise, bargain and strike. With its central position in the mining has been the pidgin language Fanagalo,
When about 300 000 mine workers labour system now ceded, Anglo American is which has long served as the lingua franca
participated in the historic 1987 strike, Anglo still central to continuing the unwinding of on gold mines, where it allowed functional
American mines were the centre of gravity. its legacies. Recently, Anglo American and communication between a white
The company would stay central to major AngloGold Ashanti jointly made a settlement management and a black labour force.
labour events in the democratic era. with former workers suffering from lung Anglo American was the first mining
Anglo American Platinum hostels became diseases, agreeing to a R460 million deal with group to announce its intention to phase out
the site of a now largely forgotten union workers represented by a British law firm. Fanagalo back in the 1980s. This project
war in the late 1990s involving the A settlement to cover current and former continues on mines that have since been
Mouthpeace Workers’ Union, which brutally gold mine workers who have contracted lung divested.
usurped the NUM for a brief period. diseases, as well as their dependants, While Anglo American is sometimes said
In 2014, the same company was at the continues to be negotiated. to have “built” modern South Africa through
centre of the largest strike of the democratic The company no longer has any interests investment and wealth creation, its historical
era when most of the platinum industry in the gold sector after divesting what is role will largely have been through the
ground to a halt for five months in the first now AngloGold Ashanti in 2004. hundreds of thousands of men who travelled
show of strength by the new force in the Anglo American has nonetheless set aside the well-worn paths to the Witwatersrand
union world, the Association of Mineworkers a provision for settling this long-externalised from across South Africa and beyond.
48 ANGLO AMERICAN 100 YEARS