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>> That said I don't see why these folks don't have drones of their own There's some important historical context here. The client was a South African mining c

>> That said I don't see why these folks don't have drones of their own There's some important historical context here. The client was a South African mining company (I assume - it said mining company, and the company is in South Africa). There were recent riots in South Africa between a miner's union and the mine, and the miner's got slaughtered (literally). Most likely not the same company, but miner's in South Africa have a long, unfair history and it's getting worse. They're extremely destitute and there's no way I see them showing up to future protests with their own air support. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marikana_miners'_strike http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marikana_miners'_strike

ChuckMcM 12y ago
The South African's aren't the only one, miners in the coal belt of the US, and in China today, have always been victimized by unscrupulous corporations. In both those cases having documentation of the problems with video from a drone could have furthered the miner's interest in getting justice. That was what I was trying to say that with my comment about them (the miners) having drones of their own.
- TallGuyShort 12y ago
  Oh I agree - I think they SHOULD have drones of their own, I just think they're a lot less likely to have access to them than miners in America or most parts of the middle east. Don't know much about China, but yeah. I should have posted my comment as a top-level comment because it ended up being a more general response than to your comment specifically.
_djo_ 12y ago
The use of UAVs for commercial use, including this application, is at present illegal in South Africa. So it's not at all certain that the client is a South African mining company. You're oversimplifying the events at Marikana, which were somewhat more complex. The shooting itself was preceded by days of violence in which striking miners armed themselves with pangas (machetes) and guns and massacred two police officers, two mine security officers and six other miners accused of not participating in the strike. It was the South African Police Service, not the mine, which shot 34 miners on that horrible day. They did so after an operation to remove the miners from the hilltop went horribly wrong, causing armed miners to run towards a line of policemen who panicked and opened fire. It also does not appear that the miners' union involved, AMCU, is negotiating in good faith. Their non-negotiable salary demand of approximately US$1170 in base pay plus another US$470 in benefits takes them into the upper percentile of all South Africans and is more than a software developer with a three-year degree earns on entering the workplace. Moreover, each time the government and the mines reach an agreement with AMCU on wages, AMCU has added additional demands not previously mentioned. It's clear their main desire is to extend the strike, already the longest in South Africa's history and responsible for two successive quarterly declines in GDP this year. Those types of wages aren't sustainable, so we're starting to see the mining companies adopt the same techniques used in Australia and elsewhere which are more automated and require far fewer workers. In the end those who suffer will be the miners and their families, most of whom live in dirt-poor rural areas and have no other income options. They've been abused by the mining companies and their own union in equal measure and let down by an incompetent government. There's no good outcome for them now.
- wavefunction 12y ago
  I would just point out to you in your rush to condemn the miner's desires for increased compensation that a software developer, even one with a three-year degree, is unlikely to be crushed or killed or suffocated or maimed in the course of their work. That laborers who risk life and limb should demand part of the prodigious wealth they are responsible for extracting sounds eminently sensible. So yeah.
  - _djo_ 12y ago
    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.
coldtea 12y ago
>Most likely not the same company, but miner's in South Africa have a long, unfair history and it's getting worse. Not much unlike the miners in the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_County_War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_County_War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_County,_USA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_County,_USA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Which_Side_Are_You_On%3F http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Which_Side_Are_You_On%3F

ChuckMcM 12y ago

The South African's aren't the only one, miners in the coal belt of the US, and in China today, have always been victimized by unscrupulous corporations. In both those cases having documentation of the problems with video from a drone could have furthered the miner's interest in getting justice. That was what I was trying to say that with my comment about them (the miners) having drones of their own.

TallGuyShort 12y ago
Oh I agree - I think they SHOULD have drones of their own, I just think they're a lot less likely to have access to them than miners in America or most parts of the middle east. Don't know much about China, but yeah. I should have posted my comment as a top-level comment because it ended up being a more general response than to your comment specifically.

_djo_ 12y ago

The use of UAVs for commercial use, including this application, is at present illegal in South Africa. So it's not at all certain that the client is a South African mining company. You're oversimplifying the events at Marikana, which were somewhat more complex. The shooting itself was preceded by days of violence in which striking miners armed themselves with pangas (machetes) and guns and massacred two police officers, two mine security officers and six other miners accused of not participating in the strike. It was the South African Police Service, not the mine, which shot 34 miners on that horrible day. They did so after an operation to remove the miners from the hilltop went horribly wrong, causing armed miners to run towards a line of policemen who panicked and opened fire. It also does not appear that the miners' union involved, AMCU, is negotiating in good faith. Their non-negotiable salary demand of approximately US$1170 in base pay plus another US$470 in benefits takes them into the upper percentile of all South Africans and is more than a software developer with a three-year degree earns on entering the workplace. Moreover, each time the government and the mines reach an agreement with AMCU on wages, AMCU has added additional demands not previously mentioned. It's clear their main desire is to extend the strike, already the longest in South Africa's history and responsible for two successive quarterly declines in GDP this year. Those types of wages aren't sustainable, so we're starting to see the mining companies adopt the same techniques used in Australia and elsewhere which are more automated and require far fewer workers. In the end those who suffer will be the miners and their families, most of whom live in dirt-poor rural areas and have no other income options. They've been abused by the mining companies and their own union in equal measure and let down by an incompetent government. There's no good outcome for them now.

wavefunction 12y ago
I would just point out to you in your rush to condemn the miner's desires for increased compensation that a software developer, even one with a three-year degree, is unlikely to be crushed or killed or suffocated or maimed in the course of their work. That laborers who risk life and limb should demand part of the prodigious wealth they are responsible for extracting sounds eminently sensible. So yeah.
- _djo_ 12y ago
  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.

coldtea 12y ago

>Most likely not the same company, but miner's in South Africa have a long, unfair history and it's getting worse. Not much unlike the miners in the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_County_War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_County_War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_County,_USA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_County,_USA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Which_Side_Are_You_On%3F http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Which_Side_Are_You_On%3F