I brought up the software developer salary to show what the wage levels in South Africa are. Compare it to what a new college grad earns at their first programming job in the US to get an idea of the disparity. In general, South African wages are low.

It also does not matter that the work miners do is difficult and dangerous, because wages are determined by supply and demand, not sheer effort. In a developed country with near full employment you do tend to see dangerous jobs providing much higher wages, in part because of the immense difficulty in hiring people willing to do them, but in SA with its enormous unemployment there are thousands of unskilled and desperate people willing to perform any job. It's not uncommon to see tens of thousands of people turn up for a job opportunity with only one or two hundred places.

South African mines are labour-intensive as a result of the cheap black labour made available by Apartheid, creating a migrant labour system in which black males left their families in rural areas to live at the mines for a few years, remitting money back. Over time, as the rest of the world embraced mechanisation and other productivity improvements, reducing the manpower needed to run a mine, local miners persisted with their labour intensive process because it was, frankly, cheap. It did not improve once the ANC took power, as they explicitly pressured mining firms to avoid doing anything that might reduce total employment in the mining sector.

It's in the context of that many people employed on each mine that the union's wage demands are unsustainable. While one can argue that the mining firms ought to have done more to improve the living conditions of their workers while the platinum and gold price were high, the fact is that both have been stagnant for years now and most South African mines, being deeper than most and expensive to operate, have become marginal with profit only just outpacing costs. This is why all major mining firms are looking elsewhere for their big investments and profit opportunities.

I've seen the figures: The only way the mines can sustain that high a wage is to close all of the marginal mines (noting that a closed shaft cannot be re-opened because of the immense depth) and to heavily mechanise the rest, retrenching most of their employees in the process. This isn't fair for those employees, it's not their fault the South African economy is in decline and precious metal prices aren't high enough, but that's economic reality. We can't wish it away, no matter how much we would like to.

As I said in the parent post, those who suffer the most will be the miners. Neither their unions nor the government gave any thought to investing in retraining programmes to help them find alternative employment, and none made any attempt to reverse the destructive migrant labour system. Inflation has driven up living costs to the point where most are now indebted to loan sharks far past their ability to ever pay. And most of the workers come from the poorest and most rural parts of the Kwazulu-Natal and Eastern Cape provinces, where, even in this modern age, the government has granted all land ownership to local tribal chiefs who can kick anyone off at any time, so the workers and their families don't even have permanent assets like property that they can fall back on.

With few to no transferable skills, no assets, and indebted to the hilt these people are in a terrible situation with, as I said, no good outcome. It's a human catastrophe that experts saw coming but nobody in a position of power did anything to prevent.