80,000 South African Platinum Miners Strike For A Living Wage

And the price of platinum’s gone up because of the anticipated supply constraint, since South Africa supplies 80 percent of the world market. The share prices of the companies have gone up, but the South African economy is crashing. Our currency, along with, I suppose, the Argentine peso, really lead the fragile five economies. South Africa was once considered a rising BRIC, one of the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa new bloc, the BRICS bloc… the twentieth anniversary of our liberation coming up. But unemployment is quite a lot higher, about 10 percent higher than then. And the inequality rate, the GINI coefficient, is much higher. Poverty is about the same. So in this context, those who have jobs often need to feed quite a few more people….