Loading ...Gold street is where South Africa’s mining history goes to die
That’s where Paseka Selemela has been guarding cars since 2010, when the scaffolding business he worked for closed. Prior to that, he was an assistant at a now-shuttered mine owned by AngloGold Ashanti Ltd. Nor has he found work in other gold mines around the town, home to the world’s deepest shafts. Many of his friends and family members also have joined the legions of the retrenched, including 8,500 people in the area last year alone.
“These people can’t find jobs, just like me,” Selemela, 34, said under the winter sun, wearing a torn, dirty Chelsea soccer club shirt and jeans that hung loosely on his thin frame. “They try at the retailers, but there is nothing available there. They are employing fewer people because people are buying less. There’s no money.”
Additional cuts are to come across mines and towns in South Africa, once the world’s biggest producer of gold. A volatile currency, uncertainty about regulations and demand, labor union tensions, harder-to-access ore, high operating costs and falling prices mean about half of gold and platinum operations are loss-making.
More than 6 million people are unemployed and looking for work, taking the jobless rate to about 28 percent, a 15-year high. This excludes 2.5 million discouraged job seekers.
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