The Politics of Platinum

Platinum is among the world’s rarest and most valuable metals, prized for its strength and its contribution to cleaner air, cancer care and electronics. Almost three-quarters of world production comes from a single place — South Africa — leaving the metal and the country’s politics inextricably linked. For many platinum miners, things haven’t changed much in the 21 years since apartheid ended, offering a familiar contradiction between the luster of the metal, along with its precious cousins, gold and diamonds, and the fortunes of the people who dig it out of the ground.

Squeezed by a price slump and higher costs that have left most mines unprofitable, platinum producers are trying to shut sites and cut jobs. The metal’s price has tumbled 45 percent from its post-financial-crisis high of $1,915.75 an ounce in 2011 to reach a six-year low by the middle of 2015. South Africa’s biggest producers face pressure to keep mines open to keep thousands of workers employed in a country where one in every four people is out of work. Platinum mining is concentrated in a ring of cliffs in the northeast part of the country where miners dig for the metal in a labor-intensive process using hand-held drills. Miners walked off the job in January 2014 in an industrywide strike that paralyzed production of the country’s top export. The standoff over pay and benefits dragged on for five months and became the longest and most-costly mining strike in South African history. It involved more than 70,000 workers, claimed at least four lives and left thousands dependent on food handouts as miners went without pay. The biggest union was demanding wages that were more than double what some workers received and was forced to compromise. With the industry accounting for about 5 percent of gross domestic product and employing about 198,000 people, the deadlock caused South Africa’s economy to contract in the first quarter of 2014. The three biggest platinum producers say the strike cost them about $2 billion in sales, though their stockpiles of the metal kept the market supplied.