Speakers: Dr Tendai Gwatidzo and Dr Miracle Benhura University of the Witwatersrand
Date: Thursday, 6 November 2014
Time: 12:30 – 13:30
Venue: VCRs, Pretoria, Cape Town, Durban
This seminar is focused on a study which helps to shed light on the recent unrest in the South African mining sector. It dwells on wage disparities within a comparative context, and also assesses the sector’s performance in recent times. The analysis is based on a review of existing literature and descriptive statistics extracted from Statistics South Africa’s Labour Force Surveys for 2001-10.
The findings allude to a temporal decline in sector’s contribution to the South African economy; decrease in output, export earnings and employment. Further, remuneration in the sector is largely driven by average output prices rather than productivity. Nonetheless, huge disparities exist in the sector’s distribution of income, with CEOs earning 300 times more than most workers. The latter are, however, paid more than counterparts in other sectors, on average.
The average minimum wage for South African mining workers exceeds that of other African and BRICS group of countries. This observation and that mining workers are known for strikes underscores the importance of factoring their conditions of service in their pay structure. The study also uncovered an education-related black-white wage differential in the sector.
The seminar may be attended in Pretoria, Cape Town and Durban
RSVP by 5 November
Cape Town: Jean Witten (021) 466 8004, jwitten@hsrc.ac.za 12th Floor, Plein Park Building, Plein Street, Cape Town
Durban: Ridhwaan Khan (031) 242 5400, rkhan@hsrc.ac.za 1st Floor, 750 Francois Road, Ntuthuko Junction, Pods 5 and 6, Cato Manor
Pretoria: Arlene Grossberg (012) 302 2811, acgrossberg@hsrc.ac.za 1st Floor, HSRC Building, 134 Pretorius Street, Pretoria