More than 1,000 mineworkers at South African Sibanye Gold's Driefontein mine are staging a sit-in to protest the death of a colleague, a union said on Wednesday.
Joseph Mathunjwa, the president of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), told news channel eNCA the workers were protesting Sibanye's refusal to take responsibility for the death and begun their protest on Tuesday.
Mathunjwa said that the workers' demand was that the deaths of the employees should be treated as a mine accident but the company was disputing the issue.
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"The mine workers are saying that those workers died during working hours, so that death should be classified as a mine accident which is what the mine is disputing," he said.
Mines are required by law to halt production if a death or injury is caused through mining activity.
James Wellsted, Sibanye's spokesman, told eNCA that the sit-in was a wildcat strike, and would not engage the workers while they were underground at the mine in Carltonville, west of Johannesburg.
"They have agreed to come up and they will be coming up from underground now," James Wellsted, spokesman for the gold producer told Reuters.
AMCU, which has 29 percent of the workforce in the gold sector, led a five-month wage strike last year in the platinum sector.
- Reuters
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