Lonmin will never learn
The ANC Youth League has learnt with shock that Lonmin management has given notice of contemplated retrenchments, couched as restructuring, to organized labour.
The timing of the notice, right in the middle of an emotive and highly charged hearings on how more than 40 people lost their lives, is indicative of capital's ingrained cruelty. Despite concerted overtures from grieving families, seeking healing and closure, during this difficult time, Lonmin management has the audacity to issue a notice on possible retrenchments.
This makes a mockery and a farce of entire commission charade, a clear and unambiguous expression of the permanent and irreconcilable conflict and contradictions between labour and capital. Contradictions which in our country are marked and as we know historical and racial in nature.
The notice of restructuring is an insult to the mineworkers who celebrated the wage settlement reached with Lonmin management less than a month ago. Obviously the settlement was nothing but "concomitant" action when faced with the resolve and the determination of workers fighting for what was rightly and justly due to them. It was a cruel trick management used to lure workers back to work, unaware that even before they could enjoy what was a well deserved victory, them or their colleagues and comrades would be facing looming unemployment and even harsher poverty.
The ANC Youth League calls for sanity in the midst of a national crisis. Lonmin, it's management, directors and shareholders should attempt to preserve any shred of humanity and integrity that may still have by permanently halting this callous and cruel restructuring process. The workers themselves and the grieving families and friends must question what sort of monster they are sitting next to day after day in the hearings, thinking they are seeking justice and closure from murderers who may or may not have once had a heart.
Statement issue dby Khusela Sangoni-Khawe, ANCYL Head of Communications, November 1 2012
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