“If we can work with labour and the government to negotiate, navigate and talk to a more flexible labour structure — I’m not asking people to work more hours — to address migrant labour in a more constructive way and to address the social issues and pressures we have, then we could operate our plants more hours, which provides more employment.   We’ve put this proposition forward a number of times and, to me, it’s been too tough because it means change.  In a country where we have adversarial industrial relations that’s a tough conversation, but we need to have that conversation if we are going to change the future of our industry.  We have to make that change or the job losses won’t continue, they’ll accelerate”.

What Mark Cutifani, CEO of Anglo American, said last night In a speech at the Gordon Institute of Business Science and quoted in Allan Seccombe’s report Cutifani takes on Mantashe over job cuts first published in Businss Day today.