The largest unions in South Africa's gold mining sector declared disputes with producers on Thursday after wage talks deadlocked, sending the negotiations to a government mediator, a necessary regulatory step before their members can go on strike.
The two sides have been poles apart: the industry squeezed by falling prices and rising costs versus labour demands for big wage hikes to close what it says is the "apartheid wage gap" - the disparities that persist between the black workforce and white management two decades after white rule ended.
A spokesman for the National Union of Mineworkers, the biggest union in the gold sector, said it did not hold out much hope that the parties could reach a deal under mediation and that a strike against AngloGold Ashanti, Harmony Gold and Sibanye was "unavoidable." "The talks have completely collapsed, it as if we had never negotiated at all," spokesman Livhuwani Mammburu told Reuters.