The Material Basis of Worker Subjectivity: Rock Drill Operators on the South African Platinum Mines in Historical Perspective

Introduction

From 23 January 2014, when the longest ever strike in the history of the South African mining industry started, the majority of the 70 000 miners on the industry-wide strike on the platinum mines went back to their rural homesteads and survived by tilling their lands and eking out a rural existence. Never completely proletarianised, their parcels of land enabled them, extreme hardship notwithstanding, to weather the five-month long strike. The workers’ union, the Associated Mineworkers and Construction Workers Union (AMCU), had instructed them to listen to the radio to alert them to return to work. The exclusively migrant labour Rock Drill Operator (RDO) occupation was the backbone of this strike. It was similarly the collective actions of this occupation which precipitated the 2012 mining strike wave and the events of Marikana in August 2012. In attempting to understand worker subjectivity in the context of Marikana, the role of the RDOs and the formation of their independent rock drill operator worker committees, must consequently be appreciated.

Outside and beyond representational politics and the industrial relations system, independent and informal RDOs workers’ committees have been known to negotiate directly with mine management since 1985, albeit episodically. AMCU is at least the fifth union which has attempted to formally organise them. In 2012, after a generation of independent struggle, the RDOs finally broke the bounds of their occupational syndicalism and united other mineworkers to join them in demanding the now iconic basic cash wage of R12500 ($125).

A full-scale study is required to understand the trajectory of the struggle of the RDOs, the powerful sense of collective subjectivity which informs their actions and the broader assertion of collective worker subjectivity on the platinum mines. While workers’ wage demand of R12500, initially articulated by independent RDO worker committees, was straight forwardly rooted in their historically rooted self-identity as those who work the hardest in the mines, neither the 2012 strike wave, Marikana, or the 2014 strike were ordinary events. It is clear that the death of fellow migrant mineworkers at the hands of the state at Marikana immeasurably stiffened workers’ resolve in the 2014 strike.

Although there is no attempt as yet to account for the degree of collective solidarity and resolve manifested by these workers, given the central role of the RDOs, what this article does is simply to note aspects of the history of those who have performed this job. What follows describes their work, notes a number of moments in their struggle over the past generation and simply poses the hoary old question anew: To what extent can subjectivity be accounted for in terms of historical and material conditions?

Contra Marx, of course, social being does not determine consciousness. At best, yet importantly, it lays the historical and material basis for it. Understanding worker subjectivity in general and that of the migrant miners on the platinum mines in South Africa in particular, largely remains a closed book. On the gold mines Dunbar Moodie has shown how worker identities are embedded in migrant cultures, rural social networks and how workers manifested practices of personal integrity (Moodie and Ndatshe, 1994). Following Moodie’s construal of an occupational culture and more specifically a ‘mine culture’ (1994: 16), one aspect of mineworkers working practices has been explored in the context of the labour process (Phakathi, 2013; Webster et al., 1999). Yet little is known about these workers’ self-understandings. There has certainly been no work conducted on how such self-understandings might both coincide and diverge from those of coal and gold mineworkers – both men and women – who have relayed their stories about work and life on the mines (see Nite and stewart, 2012). The attempt to come to grips with notions of self-understanding, subjectivity, and consciousness was fraught with complexity. A comparative reading of these biographical accounts did, however, show that when mineworkers expressed themselves in their own words, meaning, as a signifier of subjectivity, was displayed through ‘significant silences, discrepancies, conflicting information and imaginative interpretations, reconstructions of the past and explanations’, much of which was not readily grasped by formal scientific discourse (Nite and Stewart, 2012: 329). Attempting to come to grips with concentrated moments of collective political expression, such as Marikana, are likely to run up against similar conceptual entanglements. Whatever the case, the point of entry must be the experience of the miners themselves.

Yet even after the state sponsored massacre of Marikana in August 2012, when 34 mineworkers directly lost their lives at the hands of the police and ten others were killed in circumstances yet to be ascertained, despite a slew of words and information, only a miniscule amount of what was initially publicly reported was based on empirical evidence drawn from the voices of the platinum miners themselves. This situation persists. Only a serious and dedicated orientation towards the miners – with a sensitive and empirically grounded research strategy to match – will begin to fill the yawning gap in our understanding of what led to and precipitated what happened at Marikana and of the previous five years on the platinum mines from the perspective of those involved. Marikana was preceded by a series of sit-ins, factory occupations and strikes on the platinum mines since 2009 (Hattingh, 2010). The 2012 strike wave (Stewart, 2013) framed Marikana (Alexander et al., 2012; Jika et al., 2013) while the 2013 Amplats strike (Chinguno, 2013) and 2014 industry-wide strike followed it. While the role of the RDOs has been a central one, what needs to be explored is how mineworkers themselves thought about their collective action and what has subsequently transpired.

Hitherto largely unrecognised and certainly not treated in any detail, yet central to these events on the platinum mines, is the nature of the work and the key role played in mining production by ‘the machine operators’ – the name by which the RDOs are generally known on the mines. While the wage demand of R12500 became emblematic of the current strike, there is as yet no satisfactory answer why the RDOs embarked on the form of collective at the point at which they did. The broader and deeper question concerns how and to what extent their central role in production, viewed historically, provided the material basis for their collective social action.

I have argued elsewhere (Stewart, 2013) that at the beginning of any social explanation of the 2012 strike wave in general and Marikana in particular, is the central, but hitherto hidden role of the RDOs in underground mining production. What can be said by way of introduction here (see Stewart, 2012b), is that on one major mining house, the RDOs were known to have gone out on strike independently as an occupational group, in 1999 and 2004. More broadly, ever since the strike at Impala Platinum in February 2012, the RDOs’ actions have, unlike in the past, cohered with those of other workers in united expressions of social action.

The available evidence strongly suggests that workplace concerns have dominated the little we know about what the RDOs on the platinum mines think and how they consider their world. In short, the issue to which this paper must limit itself, in interrogating the relation between material conditions and political subjectivity in the context of Marikana, is the experience of work in the mining labour process. How this material basis for subjectivity, focused on their location in production, intersects with the impact of workers’ long-standing status as migrant workers, their harsh living conditions on the platinum mines – where many live in tiny, self-built tin shacks erected on the bare land in the immediate vicinity of the shafts where they work – and how their collective memory of past struggles has played a role in their self-understandings – as suggested by Bruchhausen (2014) – and informed their collective action, can then be broached.

The structure of the article is consequently as follows. It starts by briefly describing the central role the RDOs play in underground mining production and the social power which emanates from this objective location. Social power is understood in terms of how workers’ collective subjectivity and agency finds political expression at certain historical moments. This is taken to be key to understanding why it was the RDOs – and not any other occupational group – who initiated the mineworkers’ collective action on the platinum mines in the recent past. It suggests that their actions and demands, which broke out on surface and into the public eye, amounted to a collective assertion and representation of the objective power they understood themselves to possess in the mining production process.

In February 2012, the RDOs in particular had taken umbrage at having been overlooked when the supervisory occupational group of miners, placed above them in the organisational hierarchy in the industry, had managed at Impala Platinum to win a 18% wage increase (Hartford, 2012: 3). It is important to note that this wage increase was awarded outside the statutory bargaining procedures then in place – outside, in other words, of the representational politics of the industrial relations system. This stood in stark contrast to the self-understanding of the occupation of rock drillers, who had established themselves as an elite over the past century in South African mining (Harries, 1994), as they have done elsewhere (Lankton, 1991).

The article then moves to a case study conducted in 2005 which provides evidence for why the RDOs considered themselves the ‘kings of the mine’ (Stewart, 2013) – an appellation which goes back to the 1930s (Moodie and Ndatshe, 1994).

To link the two parts of the article it is divided into two main sections, each of which is sub-divided and designed to facilitate a narrative regarding the material context of underground mining work without which the social and political power of the RDOs manifested in strike action cannot be understood. The first part traces the history of the rock drillers, their role in the mining labour process and their attendant social power – whether they were Cornish skilled hand-driller craftsmen in the late 19th century, Chinese indentured labourers in the early 20th century, Mozambican ‘hammer boys’ who drilled both by hand and were to dominate rock drilling until the 1970s or the current echelon of predominantly Transkeian or Basotho ‘machine operator’ RDO’.

The second part of the article notes a case study undertaken in 2005 where the RDOs manifested their capacity to not only control production, but enhance it. The account shows that no other occupational group in South African mines are able to perform this productive feat. A conclusion strongly suggests that, however workers’ collective self-understandings are to be construed, whether in terms of subjectivity or consciousness, the material basis this historical narrative relates must be the starting point of any social explanation of Marikana, the events which framed it and what meaning it holds for those who were involved.

Methodologically, suffice it to say the key sources for the account are longstanding. These include ethnographic experience and engagement in a variety of mining workplaces across gold, coal, and platinum mines and triangulated, generally team-based research projects across these mining sectors (Stewart et al., 2004; Stewart, 2006; Webster et al., 1999, 2001, 2002). A range of more recent journalistic, mining and academic literature has been used to complete the sources from which data and information have been gathered.

South African mineworkers’ early social struggles

Newly proletarianised mineworkers, whether African or Afrikaner, in the late 19th century, in the early and until the middle of the 20th century, were subject to harsh working and living conditions. The families of poor white Afrikaner workers, for instance, suffered ‘broodgebrek (literally in Afrikaans: the lack of bread)’ as late as the 1960s (Visser, 2008). Of the majority of black mineworkers, virtually nothing is known, let alone how they conceived of their own collective working and living experience.

What is known is that wages hovered around subsistence levels. Where wages dropped below what was socially necessary for subsistence, workers either absconded and deserted or did not take up labour contracts, which for Charles van Onselen represented moments of working class consciousness (van Onselen, 1980). For the industry the conundrum was at what level to pitch wages, the survival of the industry being dependent on keeping wages low (Wolpe, 1972) and working hours long (Stewart, 2012a).

African mineworkers, in particular, faced not just ensuring the social reproduction of their families and communities, but the prospect of not physically surviving the rigours of mine work, due to death at work (Katz, 1994; Leger, 1991); violent conflict on the mines (Breckenridge, 1998; McNamara, 1985; Moodie, 2005); through ‘faction fights’ (Moodie and Ndatshe, 1994); criminal gang violence (Kynoch, 2000) or rampant disease (Katz, 1994; Packard, 1989). As were the craft miners of old a century before them (Katz, 1976), recent research shows how mineworkers are simply sent home to die if they are found to have either contracted HIV/AIDS or a form of pneumoconiosis (Roberts, 2009).

It has long been noted that African mineworkers went out on defensive strikes against wage cuts or for not having received rations. Although there are no statistics detailing the proportion of workers’ wages spent on food, it is fairly safe to say that this has always been greater than the average portion of income in comparison with other social classes. This point is linked directly to a struggle for subsistence survival, for it was the labour of ‘the poorest’ that was crucial for the industry’s survival. ‘By supplying cheap immigrant labour’, van Onselen writes, ‘drawn from the poorest ranks of the peasantry and bound by long contracts, it assured the mining industry of its minimum labour requirements, and placed employers in a position to undercut all black wages’ (1980: 25).

Arbitrary wage cuts and reductions were endemic in the early years of mining and applied equally to white workers (Katz, 1976). They are not unknown in the contemporary period and generally occur by the arbitrary cutting of bonuses and ‘wasting’ wages by only granting below-inflation increases or by granting inflation-linked wages in the context of soaring food prices. These cuts amount to ‘testing’ the ever-fluctuating value of labour power under these conditions and pushing it down to – or below – subsistence levels, thereby eroding any gains made through collective worker and trade union struggles.

A generation ago Martin Legassick suggested that the mining industry ‘tested’ the price of cheap labour – in other words, attempted to establish this key component of socially necessary labour – by the manipulation of wages to see how far they could be depressed (1974: 15). Regarding the 1930s, it was argued that the wages of black workers were pushed to below subsistence levels (Legassick and Hemson, 1976), while even white workers were in no position to contest the value of their labour power. Francis Wilson showed mineworkers’ wages (1972) did not increase in real terms from 1911 through to 1969 (1972). According to another account, in 1971 ‘Black miners’ wages had hardly changed since 1944’, while those in manufacturing had trebled and white miners’ wages ‘more than quadrupled’ in this period (de Vletter et al., 1981: 91).

To specify this brief account of mine workers’ struggles over a social wage to ensure basic living conditions is to outline the story of the RDOs to which this account must return.

The rock drillers, their role in the labour process and their social power

Over a century ago, rock drillers on the North American Lake Superior copper mines enjoyed ‘superior status’. This ‘working class elite’ went on strike when their status was challenged (Lankton, 1991). After gold was discovered in South Africa in 1886, rock drillers, similarly, ‘rapidly became an elite’ (Harries, 1994: 114). The first rock drillers were craft-based Cornish tin miners who initiated the drilling of the hard quartzite rock on the Witwatersrand Basin by hand at the inception of deep level mining in March 1887 (Davenport, 2013). African mine workers, dubbed ‘hammer boys’ were shortly to take over this job and by 1908 were drilling 100 000 shot holes by hand (Moodie and Ndatshe, 1994: 47). From 1903–1907 many of these rock drillers would have been indentured Chinese workers who performed this job, after which the occupation was dominated by the Mozambican ‘backbone’ of the mining industry for over 70 years until the early 1970s. They were known, Moodie shows, to have refused to drill more than one hole per day as this could become the norm for a day’s work. The current, largely migrant labour force of mineworkers from the Transkei and Lesotho, from where the RDOs on the platinum mines are currently virtually exclusively sourced, continued this tradition of being the informally recognised occupational elite of South African gold mining. This reputational tradition was emulated on the platinum mines.

The rock drillers’ manifestation of their social power, mirroring the power exercised underground can be seen as part and parcel of mineworkers’ ‘occupational culture’ (Moodie and Ndatshe, 1994; Webster et al., 1999). Workers who drilled the rock – whether by hand or machine – historically received differential treatment in mining, both locally and globally. This has been the basis of the platinum RDO-led strikes since February 2012, the events at Marikana later in August and the recent 2014 strike. In order to show the historical basis for these events, the long tradition of this occupation must be traced.

Hand drilling and the jack-hammer hands

Drilling is the most central work activity in the support, drill and blast cycle in mining and embodies considerable tacit, experiential and practical skill. Respected within mining communities, rock drillers perform the hardest job and face the most hazardous conditions underground. Yet despite being on the lower levels of the job-grading system defining wages and salaries, rock drillers often earned more than supervisors. No other occupation, for instance, earns a special allowance of R750 ($75) for simply doing their job.

The rock drillers were originally described as jack-hammer hands or later simply as ‘hammer boys.’ These men drilled the rock by hand. The occupation has a distinct origin. The first rock drillers were largely former globally mobile Cornish tin miners. From 1887 until African and then the Chinese workers took over this job, only these skilled craftsmen could drill the Witwatersrand Basin’s hard quartzite host rock. They worked a month-long contract and uniquely contracted themselves via a verbal agreement with the mine manager based on specific production targets and commanded high wages.

The jack hammerers worked in pairs and drilled with a hammer and chisels. With every hammer blow, the ‘jack’ would twist the chisel before the ‘hammer’ would deliver the next powerful blow. To drill a hole of 36 inches a shift was then the norm for a fair day’s work. Engineering designs of the rotary drill were to emulate the twisting motion of the human hand in the design of the ‘jack-hammer’ machine drill bearing the name of these early hand rock drillers, a job already taken over by black mineworkers by 1897 (see Stewart, 2013)

Indentured Chinese rock drillers

Of the Chinese indentured labourers, between 65 and 70% were rock drillers. These workers were ‘the most efficient that have ever been known on these fields’ according to a contemporary account (cited in Richardson 1982: 178–180). Mining engineers consequently used them to increase the area mined and decrease the stope-width at rock faces where the support, drill and blast production cycle takes place. This enabled the output of cleaner ore and improved the grade of the low-grade ore-body. The impact of Chinese labour during a severe profitability crisis was consequently ‘dramatic, rapid and successful’ (Richardson, 1982: 178–180).

That Chinese workers enabled narrower stope-widths is significant. Stope-widths today are considerably narrower than a century ago. The dimensions of a modern back-fill stope, over 3000m underground on gold mines, but somewhat shallower on platinum mines, reveals the cramped nature of this working environment. The stope-width is from 800 mm ‘high’. The depth of the stope is around 1 700mm. The length of the stope is generally between 30 to 40 m long and runs at an angle of between 15 and 30° and has a target ambient temperature of 28.5°C. Drilling horizontally into the rock face here is taxing, rigorous and dangerous, hence its status and the social attitudes it engenders. On platinum mines where the seam ‘disappears’ from the roughly angled horizontal gradient when ‘potholing’ occurs, ‘trenching’ takes place. This is a mining protocol where blasting follows the seam, generally downwards and workers hang in harnesses in vertical stopes while manipulating their rock drills.

The hand-held machine rock drill

In 1907, the stand-up ‘Slogger’ machine rock drill was replaced by the considerably more effective hand-held machine rock drill, even though hand drilling remained the dominant method of breaking rock through to the 1930s. Crucially, neither the hand-held machine drill, nor the process of stopping, has changed appreciably ever since. The hand-held machine rock drill continues to occupy centre stage underground as the working faces, in both gold and platinum mines, have remained stubbornly resistant to mechanisation. With full mechanisation effectively stalled in gold mines and not generalised on platinum mines, the consequence is the continued presence and need of large numbers of workers underground, with the RDOs in particular here to stay for the foreseeable future. Open-cast mining may well, however, change this short to medium term scenario.

The ‘kings of the mine’: on strike and in control of production

The status of rock drillers is not only related to the difficulties and critical position of their work, but also because they earned relatively high wages. Rock drillers were never part of the highly contested ‘maximum average system’ which placed a ceiling, from 1913 to 1965, on black mineworkers’ wages (Moodie, 2005). In the 1930s, for instance, the RDOs were viewed by their peers as the ‘kings of the mine’ owing to both the rigour of their work and their earnings which were higher than their immediate supervisors.

Dissatisfied with their job grade, wage levels and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), in 1985, a group of RDOs confirmed their social power by compelling management on an Anglo Platinum shaft to meet a delegation from their ranks who improved their working conditions. By 1999 the RDOs had formed their own informal workers’ committees – known as the ‘machine operator’ committees and over 3600 of them struck across Anglo Platinum. They were accompanied by a new small trade union representing them, reminiscent of what occurred in 2012 on the platinum mines. This smaller union, around which controversy reigned, the Mouth Piece Workers Union (MPWU), only managed to gain a foothold among their ranks as they had not been adequately serviced by the NUM.

When 400 RDOs on an Anglo Platinum shaft went on a series of ‘RDO strikes’ in 2004, they were dismissed. In these strikes the RDOs used violent tactics against other workers and lost supervisors their anticipated Christmas bonus. Tensions were acute on the shaft as the RDOs clung to their unrecognised informal committees. From February 2012, however, the RDOs did not alienate fellow workers, but brought them out on strike instead. Whether these workers collectively understand themselves as a ‘vanguard’ is not known, although one RDO asserts that ‘If RDOs were to decide not to work for a day, the whole mine will be on a standstill’ (Alexander et al., 2012: 60).

In 2004 at the Anglo Platinum shaft, however, after much discussion between all parties and an external facilitator, a productivity deal was negotiated in which the RDOs were the central players. The situation was ‘normalised’. Productivity increased by 14% on the shaft, sustained over eight months. Through their own intensified efforts, the RDOs won back their wages and the company won back lost production (see Stewart, 2012b). No other occupational group could have done this.

Recent strikes on the platinum mines

Following a series of occupations and sit-ins since 2009 (Hattingh, 2010), in February 2012, at Impala Platinum, 5000 Rock Drill Operators led 12 000 other mineworkers out on strike after they were overlooked for a wage increase. With their historically entrenched status ignored by both management and the NUM, these RDOs took action and triggered what became the most extensive strike wave in South African labour history. In August at Lonmin’s Marikana mines, 3000 RDOs followed the Impala RDOs’ example (see Chinguno, 2013: 2). Other mineworkers across the platinum and gold mines, as well as sporadically on the collieries and elsewhere, including on farms, arguably took the RDOs actions as their cue to wage a series of often violent legally unprotected wage strikes and articulate other demands, most notably at Anglo Platinum.

From around 1985, prior to the formation of Anglo Platinum or the arrival of the NUM, groups of rock drill operators negotiated directly with management under their own recognisances. Such negotiations took place from 1985 through to 2004 on at least one major platinum producer. There is no record of any other occupational group in mining engaged in this manner, least of all without some form of formal representation. Strikes involving RDOs broke out company-wide in 1999 and again across one shaft in 2004. By 2012, however, in a manner which is yet not clear, but which crucially speaks to a change in how the RDOs thought about their struggles and position on the mines, instead of embarking on action on their own, they took other workers out alongside them in what became a strike wave that year. What happened in 2004 is instructive for understanding the occupational cohort of the RDOs.

The background to strikes by RDOs in 2004

In 2004, on one particular platinum mine shaft, RDOs went out on strike three times during the year. Their demands need to be put into the context of a longer struggle, which, according to internal company documents, were traced back to 1985. The central issue relates to the key matter of the RDOs’ job description, their job grading and pay rates in a particularly stressful job under working conditions that in 1987 were described as ‘extreme’, ‘racist and dehumanising’ (Peeke, 1987: 48).

Two decades ago, when two-handed drilling was the norm, machine operators (the ‘jack’) and their assistants (the ‘hammer’) were on level 5 of the standard South African mining industry Patterson grading system instituted in the mid-1960s when the ‘maximum average’ system came to an end (Moodie, 2005: 547). They were upgraded to level 6 or 7 in the same year, depending on whether the most recent version of the ‘lightweight drill’ was being used. In retrospect, there has been a remarkable degree of stability overall in the job of machine operator since the introduction of the hand-held machine rock drill in the mid-1900s. David Frost dates the introduction of the ‘light weight reciprocating rock drill’ to between 1905 and 1915 (1987: 6).

In 1985, a newer, modified lightweight rock drill, the first incarnation of which had been introduced seven decades earlier, saw negotiations between employee trade unions and the mining company elevate machine operators to level 8 in 1988. This change in wage scale was accompanied by 80% of the assistants’ production bonus (later negotiated to 100%) in addition to regular machine operators’ bonuses, in exchange for drilling without an assistant, in other words one-handed. In other words, in exchange for doing two jobs, the machine operator took over the bonus, but not the wage, of his erstwhile assistant. There is no mention in the records available that production targets were reduced. The majority of gold mines, it might be noted, currently continue with two-handed drilling; one-handed drilling was never witnessed in a series of underground gold mines visited over the last decade.

Subsequently, increases to the machine operators’ production bonus were implemented, one being in March of 1992. This was done particularly in situations with narrow stope-widths and uncomfortable and difficult rock breaking conditions underground. In such conditions the geology is stratified and the rock is friable and very different from gold bearing substrates. This appears to have occurred without trade union intervention when wages were increased at a time when the company prided itself in being the best paying mine in the area. This proud claim does not seem to be currently to be a matter of concern. It is of note that this particular 10% increase in the bonus applied to mining in stope-widths of less than 115cm, whereas a decade later stope widths are often a challenging 80cm in platinum mines, 90cm often being the targeted norm in a range of platinum and other gold mines. This bonus increased a further 8% a year later.

On this mine shaft, the stope-width on which budgets were calculated was 94 cm and the face advance was 8 m per month per stope face, while actual figures averaged around 102 cm and 10 m, respectively. Where miners boast about their tonnage or centares mined – the number of cubic metres (the length of the stope face multiplied by the face advance) of rock blasted – critical peers always inquire about their stope-width. If this is wider than accepted norms, they ridicule such boasts by charging their peers with mining rock instead of platinum or gold: an important productivity measure is grams per ton, which, with a given head grade (actual grams per ton in the ore-body), is heavily dependent on stope-width. Mining low stope-widths requires both skill and a significant degree of personal commitment, as the space within which the miner works is more cramped and uncomfortable the narrower the stope width – which must be understood as the ‘height’ of the stope from ‘footwall’ to ‘hanging wall’. Productivity overall hinges hence not only on the measure of grams mined per ton which depends on the geology of the ore-body, but is crucially related to the stope-width.

Such daily fraternal altercations and rivalry among the miners aside, sometime later, the company signalled that, while it continued to be the best paying mine in the area, it was nevertheless willing to meet a delegation of machine operators, with the proviso that no meetings would be granted under the threat of industrial action. The matter of installing additional compressors to increase air pressure to the rock drills – as occurred again in 2004 – was also noted: this would permit a decrease in the time taken to drill, thereby improving productivity, and, of course, socially necessary labour time, by way of mechanised relative surplus value extraction. In the same year, 1995, the drilling bonus was increased by a further 8% and an additional 3% adjustment in line with that year’s wage negotiations. But this was not enough to prevent matters eventually culminating in the entire occupational group of 3616 machine operators across the company going out on a legally unprotected strike in 1999. The demand of the machine operators, to be raised to level 12 of the wage scale, was not met. An agreement signed between the company and the NUM brought these matters temporarily to a close.

In 1999, it was noted that team-work and ‘metres drilled per operator per shift’, a measure not currently in general use, impacted on the bonuses awarded. Less than a decade ago, an increase above a specified target amounted to an average of an additional R40 per month in each operator’s wage packet. The measure of ‘metres drilled per operator per shift’ was, however, to become the basis for the new negotiated targets to improve overall face advance per mining section in order to resolve the impasse the RDOs faced after the annual leave strikes in 2004 (see Stewart, 2013).

In the strike year of 1999, the machine operators were generally dissatisfied with their work situation, directing this dissatisfaction at both management and the unions. The establishment of informal ‘machine operator committees’ across the company had led to the more direct involvement of a then fairly recently established union prepared to take up their cause. A group calling itself the ‘Five Madoda’ (five men in the patois of South African mining – Fanakalo) emerged. It appears that from this group the MPWU was initiated and began to articulate the RDOs’ concerns. This occurrence on the platinum mines supports Dunbar Moodie’s argument that, born out of a crisis of integrity in migrant cultures, ‘some of the old men of integrity were eventually moved to defy the union’ (i.e. the NUM) (Moodie and Ndatshe, 1994: 306). Within the federation of COSATU, of which the NUM and these RDOs were initially part, certainly since the early 1990s, acknowledgements were made that political issues had overshadowed traditional trade union issues: ‘We were not focusing on improving production, the quality of production … We were not making demands around production’ (cited in Buhlungu, 2000: 81). This general lack of attention on the part of trade unions to the ‘production demands’ of their own members continues into the present (see Stewart, 2012b).

The production demands of RDOs at this mine shaft were concerned not only with the drilling bonuses and their calculation, but also with proposals to increase their wage scale to level 14 and to be remunerated the salaries (not just the bonuses) of their erstwhile assistant ‘hammers’, as well as a re-evaluation of the job description of the RDOs on the wage band scales. Present in these meetings in 1999 of machine operators was a delegate who became central in the strikes of 2004 and who had been the president of the ‘central committee’ of the machine operators’ committee structure, a clearly charismatic militant known as ‘Ma-Aid’ – the one who helps. For the mine manager he was a ‘Hitler’.

The bold claims put by the RDOs – and the Mouth Piece Workers’ Union (MPWU) most visibly representing them at the time – were not met by company management. Trade union rivalry across the mining industry as a whole was intense and spilled over into violence, epitomised by the tragic death of an NUM organiser, Selby Mayise (Bezuidenhout and Buhlungu, 2006: 261). It was very tense on the gold mines that day when researchers arrived to do a stint of ethnographic research of living in the mine hostel only a stone’s throw from where Mayise had been killed. The meeting that resulted in Mayise’s death was a report-back regarding the Mineworkers’ Provident Fund. What had not been discussed with the workers it seems was that only one beneficiary – a man’s first wife – could be documented in the event of a member’s death, and some workers had more than one wife whom they wished to benefit from any payments made by the Fund in the event of their death.

In the wake of the signing of a fully negotiated Employee Relations policy designed to address the violence, but which excluded the machine operator committees, these committees were formally, but not entirely in spirit, dissolved after much negotiation three years later in 2002.

It was only at the mine shaft in question that dissatisfaction among the machine operators resurfaced openly, the informal machine operator committee being re-established, due particularly it would appear, to the involvement of ‘Ma-Aid’ – the militant ex-President of the then defunct machine operators’ ‘central committee’. After having apparently dissolved after the ER policy signing in 2002, the RDOs’ committees re-emerged at the beginning of 2004. They became ‘more visible’ in March of that year. In fact they became ‘very visible’ according to the HR manager, congregating outside the gates of the shaft. Once underground the machine operators started a work-to-rule, closing their machines at 1pm, exactly eight hours after they had been hoisted down, instead of the nine hour, 20 minute shift as per ‘normal’. They would, however, be forced to wait for the hoist at the shaft station, only to catch the scheduled ‘cage’ as per normal procedure (see Stewart, 2013).

On one occasion the RDOs congregated outside the gates of the shaft. After being addressed by the regional HR manager, they proceeded through the gates to clock in at ‘the crush’ (the clocking station on surface) and go down, only to stop work precisely eight hours later. Given the long struggle for trade union recognition, as well as the fact that these workers had just lost their capacity to bargain directly as a group with management, in the absence of further information, the congregation outside the gates of the mine may have been an attempt to assert the de facto organisational presence they had previously enjoyed, despite having becoming members of a union in opposition to the NUM.

Whatever the case, the continuation of these informal RDO committees constituted, from management’s as well as other workers’ point of view, a disruptive role in production as they articulated their specific demands; this role ultimately manifested itself in the three strikes in 2004 and the operators’ subsequent dismissal. Given what at the time had been described as the restoration of managerial authoritarianism through subcontracting within the industry, the erosion of internal trade union democracy and emerging divisions within the NUM owing to a variety of factors (Bezuidenhout and Buhlungu, 2006), and the resulting lack of focus on the shop floor, the RDOs clearly sought other avenues to advance their production and workplace-based demands. They went on to do so with the momentous results which have subsequently been the topic of urgent exploration.

Recent events

In February 2012 the RDOs took umbrage at Impala Platinum when miners received an unscheduled wage increase of 18% outside of the collective bargaining machinery which meant that they were ignored. They too, justifiably, felt their skills were scarce. The RDOs on the platinum belt had previously enjoyed special treatment by virtue of the central role they play in the labour process in mining production underground.

More recently, an AMCU health and safety official, sitting in the offices of a mining company, expressed his view of the RDOs and confirmed my understanding of events by speaking for the RDOs. He said they were saying:

What [money] are we getting? When this miner comes – who opens the stope? How could there be such a gap?’ [ie in wages]. It started at 14 shaft [of Impala Platinum]. The RDOs were ignored. The NUM tried to intervene, but they were taking things lightly and were exposed by illiterate RDOs. That’s where the problem we are in began. They said: ‘I am the job, but I am not listened to.

The statement ‘I am the job, but I am not listened to’ is a curious formulation of identity. I interpret this as further evidence regarding the centrality of the RDOs in mining production. The RDOs are at the heart of mining. What the RDOs are saying is – ‘without me there is no mining, but I am ignored’. Once there is a mine and as long as there are productive shafts, they are objectively correct. They were ignored just as are workers’ production demands – not their social or political demands, but ironically their production demands, are routinely ignored (Stewart, 2012b). Of the mineworkers most stridently articulating their production demands are the RDOs.

Among the platinum mineworkers, the RDOs are somewhat set apart from the rest of their colleagues. They are almost entirely migrant and functionally illiterate with 80% of them being migrant workers from the Eastern Cape. A great many of these RDOs are Amampondo people from the Lusikisiki/Flagstaff area primarily, but including most of Pondoland from the Mthatha River in the south to the Msikaba River in the north. RDOs normally would have long service of 25 to 35 years, are typically 45 to 55 years of age (Hartford, 2013: 161). Their conditions of employment are characterised by the toughest, most dangerous, most production-critical, core mining function. They have long standing perceptions of under-payment relative to their colleagues – especially the miner supervisors whose preferential treatment at Impala in 2012, as noted, triggered that strike. There are typically no serious service increment differentials in platinum as in the gold sector which has some incentives or other significant allowance in their pay and as such few real cash incentives to do RDO work apart from a R750 RDO allowance. In addition there is no prospect of any career progression for RDOs given their functionally illiterate status and the structure of the mining work team in respect of job categories – a pay structure which requires basic formal educational qualifications for advancement to blasting certificate and hence miner status.

In a word, the RDOs represent the personification of all the worst features of migrant mine labour (Hartford, 2013). This is arguably a segment of the mining working class who have gained the least from post-apartheid South Africa. This is a recipe for social alienation.

Concluding comments

By way of conclusion, what needs to be recognised in any social explanation of the strike wave, including Marikana in 2012 and the 2014 strike, is that it must be viewed in the context of the long-established occupational traditions of the RDOs, their sustained forms of worker organisation, the role of the RDO committees, the history of their informal institutional bargaining status on the platinum belt, their relation to the trade unions and – what we do not know – what they currently think and feel. For it is the objective structural position of the RDOs, located at the heart of mining production and who were independently organised and mobilised outside both the post-democratic political order and industrial relations system which, as a start, goes some way to providing a social explanation for the recent events on the platinum belt.

The social power of the RDOs which reflects their actual power in production lies just below the surface of AMCU and of which the union can only be too well aware. It is arguably this repository of social power which the State could simply not allow to become independently politically organised once they had broken the bounds of their occupational role and their committees’ hesitant and uneasy arrangements with the institutionalised trade unions and appeared on the surface in full public view. Yet, while workers had long rankled against both their union and their employers, there is no evidence of explicit political intention lying behind either their demands or their action. Needless to say, however, workers’ core wage demand, expressed collectively in the way the platinum workers did, by virtue of being ‘unrealistic’, is intensely political. That various political groupings attempted to articulate the miners’ actions or that the miners’ action of sitting down on the mountain or marching in disciplined fashion armed with traditional weapons was interpreted as political, is key to the story, but cannot receive attention here. What is clear, however, is that the miners’ collective action was perceived to be political, or worse, that there were ‘political motives’ behind it as if they had somehow been manipulated. Once the independent and sustained discipline, mobilisation and capacity for direct – albeit episodic – negotiation of the RDOs with their employers over thirty years comes to be recognised, nothing could be further from the truth.