BMWU, Mupane Mine fight over bonus payment
Lebogang Mosikare | Monday November 28, 2022 06:00
BMWU represents 111 who are working at MGM, the only gold mine currently in operation in Botswana, located about 30 km south east of Francistown.
The dispute over the payment of bonuses started after MGM informed BMWU that it has no obligation to pay bonuses to BMWU members at its operation. According to a paper entitled, “Bonus systems in the mining industry: Current situation and future developments”, one of the crucial elements of motivation systems are bonuses and prizes.
“Bonus is a part of a remuneration, granted to an employee as an additional part of the main wage/salary. The employee acquires the right to receive it when he or she meets defined conditions.
Rules and regulations of granting bonuses should be set precisely in documents covering this matter,” says the paper’s authors Arkadiusz Kustra and Maria Sierpińska, professors in Mining and Geoengineering and Economics respectively.
The authors continued: “In order to secure proper behaviour of all employees and integrate them around crucial assignments for an enterprise one has to design a consistent bonus system, in which basis for bonuses is clearly defined, criteria and methods of evaluation of the extent of assignments (goals) realisation, rules for linking outcomes of evaluation with bonuses and requirements of receiving bonuses, i.e. requirements that must be met by an employee in order he (or she) gets a bonus.” Realisation of assignments at the level of a company should be the basis for granting bonuses for management and administrative personnel, which have a special impact on shaping corporate results. For organisational units for which work effort results can be measured one proposes distinctive bases for bonuses, say the experts.
In the case that is currently before the Industrial Court in Francistown, the bone of contention between the BMWU and MGM is that the former signed bonus agreements with the former’s previous mine owners. MGM has since undergone several ownership and management changes hence the current stalemate. MGM says that since it has not signed any bonus agreement with BMWU it is then not obliged to pay them because the agreements were entered into with the past and not current MGM owners. Earlier this year, Galane Gold, the last owners of MGM, announced that it had completed the sale of MGM to a majority citizen-owned company, Hawks Mining Company.
The court order that was handed by Justice Galesite Baruti partly reads: “The parties having consented to the following order shall (a) will file a stated case on or before November 25, 2022, (b) Applicant will file and serve its final written submissions not later than December 2, 2022, (c) Respondent shall file and serve its final written submissions not later than December 9, 2022, (d) The parties will appear in court on December 20, 2022 to make oral submissions and (e) Judgment shall be handed down on January 20, 2023.” Before the current bonus dispute, in February this year, BMWU secured a massive victory for its MGM based members after it entered into a lucrative wage agreement with the latter. The agreement will last until April 2023. The new deal means that employees will get a wage increase amounting to six percent from April 2022 until April 2023. In addition, the employees will get another six-percent salary increase back dated from April 2021 to March 2022.
The salary talks between Mupane and BMWU have been dragging since November last year. The union had initially proposed a 13% salary increase for its members against the four percent tabled by the mine management. The union later revised its offer to eight percent early, but the mine management maintained its four percent position.
The union would later say that any offer above four percent is suitable but Mupane would not budge. It was only after the union heightened plans to embark on a legal strike that the mine tabled a six percent offer for the 2021/2022 as well 2022/2023 financial years. “We have reached an agreement with the mine management. This then means that the legal strike we were planning to embark on will not take place,” BMWU executive secretary, Karabo Phiri said then.