The Food and Allied Workers Union (FAWU) is disturbed by the developments unfolding in the platinum industry and especially in the platinum belt of Rustenburg district flowing from the current wages dispute.

Given the tragedy that has befell the Turkish mineworkers and the current wage dispute in the South African platinum belt, we hope that there will be conclusion on the current dispute and that employers and trade unions will find a proper settlement to the dispute.

We call on employers to desist from employing ‘divide-and-rule’ tactics with a view to getting mineworkers, some desperate to return back to work due to high poverty rate, to return back to work yet playing into igniting, if not fuelling, fire in the working class communities surrounding those mines.

If anything, we call on mine-owners, or should we say mine management, to stop dividing workers and preying on their new-reality situation, to get as many back to work as they can, from a moral point than legal technicality that could be on their side.

We further call on the state, especially the security forces, to remain calm as an agitated and heavy-handed intervention will result in tragic outcomes than in law-compliant dispensation. We hope that police will hunt down and apprehend culprits involved in violence without getting uneven and heavy-handed in their approach.

Equally, we call on AMCU to exercise leadership, without undermining the basic principles of mandate-driven and bottom-up decision-taking/making organizations, in packaging guidance for a settlement to be realised.

We reject with disgust those, including the Amplats CEO Chris Griffith, who would want to justify the wage gap that suggest a mineworker must work 209 years to earn one year salary the he makes in one year.