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Bloomberg reported strikers in South Africa’s platinum industry are not just angry with employers, they are also disenchanted with President Jacob Zumba’s government.
Bloomberg reported strikers in South Africa’s platinum industry are not just angry with employers, they are also disenchanted with President Jacob Zumba’s government.
As quoted in the market news:
He also blames his impoverished existence on South Africa’s ruling African National Congress. Eighteen years after Nelson Mandela led South Africa out of apartheid, President Jacob Zuma now governs a nation with the worst employer-labor relations in the world.
Such disenchantment runs deep among the nation’s 500,000 mineworkers, whose labor action has cost platinum and gold mining companies more than 4.5 billion rand in lost production this year. The discord reached an apex when police opened fire on striking workers at a Lonmin Plc (LMI) mine on Aug. 16, killing 34 in the most deadly police action in post-apartheid South Africa. That event may spell the waning of the black majority’s faith in the ANC as leaders try to dispel perceptions they’re a political elite pandering to big business for their own interests.