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31 May, 2010
Rio Tinto Zimbabwe Ltd. (RioZim), operator of the Renco Gold Mine in Zimbabwe’s Masvingo province, has maliciously taken revenge on members of the Associated Mine Workers’ of Zimbabwe (AMWZ) immediately after the end of a five-day national mine strike in mid-May. The company has discharged 70 miners, suspended 370, and given a total of 760 of Renco’s 1,000 workers final warnings for taking part in the strike.
Management’s disciplinary actions come despite the fact that all strikers at Renco returned to work within the mandatory 24-hour period after Zimbabwe’s Labour Ministry stopped the strike with a “show-cause” order on 14 May.
“Our concern now is that other mining enterprises will use this as a precedent to fire workers who took strike action,” said AMWZ President Tinago Ruzive. “In fact, as soon as we received the order, we informed all strikers to return to their jobs and we were successful in communicating this.”
(A 17 May ICEM briefing on the strike’s end can be found here.) Ruzive and the AMWZ attempted to meet with Renco management over the unfair disciplinary measures, but management refused the meeting. The union must now take the matter to a labour court.
The “show-cause” order called for a 20 May hearing on the pay strike in Harare. But the Labour Ministry cancelled that hearing and no new date has been scheduled. Some 20,000 miners struck 45 different mining companies affiliated to the Chamber of Mines in mid-May over non-payment of wage adjustments made in an arbitration award last year.
Mining companies affiliated to the chamber have also neglected to remit contributions to the Mining Industry Pension Fund, monies owed to the National Employment Council for the Mining Industry, and to the AMWZ for subscriptions, a further cause of miners taking legal strike action after the AMWZ issued the mandatory 14-day strike notice in late April.
RioZim is the country’s largest resource company listed on Zimbabwe’s bourse. Besides the Zenco Gold Mine, its assets include 22% of the Murowa diamond mine (with Rio Tinto Group holding 78%), the Empress nickel refinery in Kadoma, which processes matte from Botswana, and 50% of the Senga coal fields in Gokwe North.