Special Hearings — Business Hearings — 1997-11-13

MS MKHIZE: Thank you.  I'll be brief, but I should think the gap in the mind is around what have been raised already which you have spoken to it, but I'll put it in a slightly different way.
 What we have learned from, especially organised Afrikaans business over the past two days is that business did not always operate in a political vacuum.  They AHI, for instance, referred to their need of addressing the poor White problem when they started.
 I was - of course other people have said a lot about what they did around social responsibility and if you compare what organised Afrikaans business did for the - to eradicate the poor White problem, with the effects what social responsibility departments are doing;  you see completely different results.
 I just wanted to check your thinking whether you think, for instance, looking at the Chamber of Mines, it can be structured in such a way that it eradicate the very problem that you are conscious of as well that in your context here, you really had the majority of your workers, being the migrant labourers and you have indicated the suffering that has caused.
 So, it's really about how can business be structured in such a way that people who suffered the most end up being beneficiaries in a meaningful way, not just merely hand outs in terms of helping with schools or doing this, but restructuring business.  That's one question.
 The related one, I didn't hear much about your relationship with unions.  I saw that there's something here, but yesterday the Black Management Forum raised something which was very very important.  That conservative business in this country at a certain point adopted a strategy of getting very Black competent and efficient managers who were merely used to suppress the emergence or the power of trade unions and I would just like to check as to how has the Chamber dealt with that?  Thank you.

MR GODSELL: I'm going to respond to the first question and have Adrian respond to the second.
 Look, without in any way belittling the role of social responsibility and philanthropy, which I think is the duty of any company and the particular duty of big companies and we're characterised particularly in the gold sector by large companies, I think you're absolutely correct.
 I think if your analysis is that our industry has been absolutely shaped by the politics of racial exclusion.  The question is, can we build a new South African mining industry that reflects a non-racialism and also a democratic set of relationships between stake holders in that industry.   I really wouldn't be sitting here unless I believed that that was possible.  I do think it is going to be extraordinarily difficult and I think it's going to take incredible effort from all parties to do that.
 The first thing you have to do is to de-racialise ownership and I think the fact that the Mining Industry acted against its long term interest, but in the short term interest of White South Africans often in the past, is a fact that ownership was effectively limited to Whites.
 There are the beginnings of some movement to de-racialise ownership.  I think the de-racialising of management is the next challenge.  I think the third challenge is to complete the restructure jobs so that we have a normal distribution of race and gender across the different levels of skill and indeed that we destroy the artificial distinction between a small number of skilled workers and a large number of semi-skilled and unskilled workers.
 I think there's a need for both a non-racial and much more egalitarian work structure.  I think on almost all of these issues, we are not going to be left to in a sense our own consciences or even our own best judgement.  We're going to be doing this in association with a democratic Government and a very powerful trade union movement.
 I think people acting together do have a chance of creating a modern non-racial industry.  I ask Adrian to address the second.

BOBBY GODSELL NICK SEGAL ADRIAN DU PLESSIS: Chair, on the second issue regarding trade unionism, it is certainly the case that the Mining Industry has traditionally been extremely heavily unionised to the extent permitted by the law.
 We have made observation in our presentation of the racial exclusion of Black unions until 1983, but with the change in the law in 1983, the NUM was recognised on Chamber member mines for the purposes for negotiation at relatively low levels of representivity across the industry as a whole and of course in the last 15 years, the history of trade union management relationships in the Mining Industry is well know.
 The fact is that today the industry, the gold mining industry and the coal mining industry in its entirety is probably unionised to about 70 percent of all eligible employees.
 As Bobby has indicated, I think, a feature of industrial relations in the Mining Industry today and indeed in the past has been the management of mature union relationships at both the Chamber of Mines level, at group level and at mine and company level.
 While management union relationships have occasionally been fractious, I think there's always been a sense of interdependence and as Bobby has indicated, a common vision of an industry which is going to secure jobs, income, wages, advancement, career prospects to the best extent that the parties are able to find.

MR SEGAL: Chairman, could I just supplement Bobby's answer to the first part of the question.  I understood part of the question to refer to the wider need for jobs and if you like, dealing constructively and effectively with people who were not beneficiaries in the past and therefore outside the individual work place.  I thought that was perhaps implied in your question.
 This obviously goes beyond the boundaries or the effectiveness of the individual corporation, which you have already heard a lot from many sources over the last couple of days, about how South African business has done a great deal in recent times.
 It goes back well over a decade though;  to seek to influence that socio-economic and political environment, the policy environment, to shape, which you might call, a better society.
 I would just like to take this opportunity to add another diverse sentiment on the role of business.  You have heard about that diversity and I felt very uncomfortable more than once when people have said the business of business if business.
 Because the business of business is clearly to make profits, but frankly people are motivated to survive for the long term and it's not today's profits, it's long term survival probably that matters.
 When you acknowledge that, it therefore becomes very important to business to care very much about all those factors in the wider society that infringe upon its performance, the well-being of its employees, the stability of the society and so on.
 It's no accident that in this regard South African companies are in the fore front as Ann Bernstein commented yesterday in the resources and the involvements that they have in the public policy processes as well as in the community development processes and through community social involvement type expenditure.
 So we are already doing a great deal and that goes back quite a way outside the individual company.

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you.  Mr Glamini, last question.