4 ms·

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 Afr

by _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.
anonymousDan 12y ago
Uh, so what if they earn more than a recent graduate? I'm sure their work is plenty dangerous and also no doubt extremely profitable for the mining company, so if they want to organize to get a reasonable wage then fair play to them in my book.
coldtea 12y ago
>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. Well, miners in general create more value for their country and the world than the average "software developer with a three-year degree". Without modern computers you'd live in a 60s - 70s kind of society -- not very advanced technologically but tolerable. Without mining we'd live in a 1000 B.C. kind of environment (actually worse -- they still mined stuff back then). Heck, without miners there wouldn't even be computers for the software developer to work on (CPUs, batteries etc materials very much tied to mining)! >Those types of wages aren't sustainable Says who? The mining companies? The same companies who used child labor ("coal breakers") and paid miners a pittance while making a killing throughout the 20th century, especially taking advantage of immigrant and black miners?
- refurb 12y ago
  Wages are determined by supply and demand, not by how much value that worker adds.
- _djo_ 12y ago
  No, they don't. As with most manual labour work, mine workers produce a relatively small amount of absolute monetary value per person compared to software developers and other skilled occupations. Wages are determined by those productivity levels and supply and demand. In general, the more people who can do a job, the lower the wage. It goes without saying that this doesn't mean those with lower productivity are worth less as people, which is something many forget. All people should be treated with the same amount of care and dignity. Your argument about us being perfectly ok without modern computers is odd, to say the least. As for the wages being sustainable, the mining firms are public corporations, publish their financials openly and are audited by both private firms and the government. We are not merely taking their word for it.
  - coldtea 12y ago
    >No, they don't. As with most manual labour work, mine workers produce a relatively small amount of absolute monetary value per person compared to software developers and other skilled occupations. Wages are determined by those productivity levels and supply and demand. In general, the more people who can do a job, the lower the wage. Miners ages are mostly determined by supply and demand. What monetary value they produce doesn't come into play. It's not like the mine owners share their huge profits with the miners. >Your argument about us being perfectly ok without modern computers is odd, to say the least. Well, I lived in an era without "modern computers" and it wasn't that bad at all. In fact in several respects it was better than today. What does "perfectly OK" mean? I like my gadgets, shopping online, instant communications and everything. In fact, I'm one of those "programmers" (though with a better than 3-year degree). But none of those things are indispensable. We managed without those, not in antiquity, but merely 40-50 years ago. And even 25 years ago mostly geeks had computers. The eighties, seventies are not some medieval dark ages of humanity. Much less so the sixties.

by _djo_ 12y ago

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.

anonymousDan 12y ago

Uh, so what if they earn more than a recent graduate? I'm sure their work is plenty dangerous and also no doubt extremely profitable for the mining company, so if they want to organize to get a reasonable wage then fair play to them in my book.

coldtea 12y ago

>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. Well, miners in general create more value for their country and the world than the average "software developer with a three-year degree". Without modern computers you'd live in a 60s - 70s kind of society -- not very advanced technologically but tolerable. Without mining we'd live in a 1000 B.C. kind of environment (actually worse -- they still mined stuff back then). Heck, without miners there wouldn't even be computers for the software developer to work on (CPUs, batteries etc materials very much tied to mining)! >Those types of wages aren't sustainable Says who? The mining companies? The same companies who used child labor ("coal breakers") and paid miners a pittance while making a killing throughout the 20th century, especially taking advantage of immigrant and black miners?

refurb 12y ago
Wages are determined by supply and demand, not by how much value that worker adds.
_djo_ 12y ago
No, they don't. As with most manual labour work, mine workers produce a relatively small amount of absolute monetary value per person compared to software developers and other skilled occupations. Wages are determined by those productivity levels and supply and demand. In general, the more people who can do a job, the lower the wage. It goes without saying that this doesn't mean those with lower productivity are worth less as people, which is something many forget. All people should be treated with the same amount of care and dignity. Your argument about us being perfectly ok without modern computers is odd, to say the least. As for the wages being sustainable, the mining firms are public corporations, publish their financials openly and are audited by both private firms and the government. We are not merely taking their word for it.
- coldtea 12y ago
  >No, they don't. As with most manual labour work, mine workers produce a relatively small amount of absolute monetary value per person compared to software developers and other skilled occupations. Wages are determined by those productivity levels and supply and demand. In general, the more people who can do a job, the lower the wage. Miners ages are mostly determined by supply and demand. What monetary value they produce doesn't come into play. It's not like the mine owners share their huge profits with the miners. >Your argument about us being perfectly ok without modern computers is odd, to say the least. Well, I lived in an era without "modern computers" and it wasn't that bad at all. In fact in several respects it was better than today. What does "perfectly OK" mean? I like my gadgets, shopping online, instant communications and everything. In fact, I'm one of those "programmers" (though with a better than 3-year degree). But none of those things are indispensable. We managed without those, not in antiquity, but merely 40-50 years ago. And even 25 years ago mostly geeks had computers. The eighties, seventies are not some medieval dark ages of humanity. Much less so the sixties.