“Driving our shared value of respect and care

The events in the South African platinum sector over the past few years have highlighted the importance of developing and maintaining positive relations between management and employees. The incidents before, during and after last year’s five-month strike across the Rustenburg platinum belt brought to the fore the significant challenges associated with rebuilding trust between and within business, labour and government. Working to regain this trust and restore productivity is fundamental to restoring the long-term economic viability of the platinum industry, and remains a core focus area for the Company.

Our approach to employee relations

Informed by the developments of the past year, our employee relations (ER) vision has been to foster a new, dynamic and sustainable partnership with our employees and their representative bodies, with the aim of becoming the best employer in the platinum industry. Our ER mission is to ensure that our people are treated with respect and care, fairly rewarded for their contribution, empowered to raise their concerns, safely engaged in their daily duties, and able to deliver on their organisational goals.

To achieve this mission and vision, we have set ourselves the following strategic goals:

• Ensuring high levels of employee engagement, based on the shared values of respect and care
• Establishing collaborative relationships with all unions in a multi-union environment
• Empowering frontline management to engage effectively with employees
• Restructuring the ER function to enable the achievement of the ER strategy.

Our labour relations policy deals with freedom of association, recognition of trade unions, discrimination and the rights of employees and contractors. We constantly monitor the state of labour relations in our operations, with reports regularly submitted from the operations to the Exco. An independent third party conducts biannual surveys on the effectiveness of our labour relations. We respect the independent status of unions and the right of our employees to associate, or not to associate, and we strive to ensure full compliance with local labour legislation, which is in alignment with the provisions of the core conventions of the International Labour Organisation (ILO). We work closely with unions to resolve all internal disputes through dispute resolution mechanisms and (in South Africa) within the auspices of the Commission for Conciliation Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA). We prohibit any attempt to differentiate between people on the basis of colour, religion, gender or creed, other than as part of conscious efforts to promote diversity and transformation.

Currently 82% of permanent employees in South Africa, and 37% of employees in Zimbabwe are covered by collective bargaining agreements. These agreements address issues relating to salary and benefit reviews, the participation of unions in decision-making at different forums, consultation and notice periods regarding any significant organisational changes. The minimum notice period for any organisational change or activity at Implats’ operations is 30 days.

We carefully monitor the state of industrial relations and the wage negotiations environment, both among our immediate competitors as well as in the mining industry more broadly. A key focus this year has been the wage negotiation process within the gold sector. Our monitoring activities include holding round table discussions with labour analysts, tracking developments on social media, participating at the forums hosted by the Chamber of Mines, and through our Impala future forum, a body that includes representatives from the Rustenburg local municipality (RLM) and the Royal Bafokeng Nation/Administration (RBN/A), as well as representatives from unions and Impala management. Prior to wage negotiations we hold business planning meetings with union representatives. We also provide externally run negotiation training and bargaining courses for shop stewards.