All Ghanaian miners to put down tools for the first time in 20 years

Thousands of miners at Gold Fields Ghana’s Tarkwa mine whose appointments are to see a permanent termination has seen the National Executive Council of Ghana Mineworkers’ Union (TUCG) stand in solidarity with them.

The supposed contract termination begun in November 2017 is part of the mine's superficial redundancy exercise.

This development the TUCG have called unfair and has painstakingly put the relevant facts and all the necessary information on the matter into the public space for critical analysis and scrutiny.

According to the general secretary of the Union Prince Williams Ankrah, the events have unfolded for almost three months now but things got to a head on March 2, 2018 when the Labour Division of the High Court, Accra, disappointingly refused an application for injunction filed by the Union to restrain Gold Fields from carrying out the intended redundancy exercise. Immediately after the ruling, the Union filed an application for stay of execution and also a motion for appeal at the Appeal’s Court on grounds that the reasons the Court relied on to refuse the injunction application were not sufficient. These were therefore immediately served on the Company and its lawyers in the afternoon of the same day.

Following the judiciary move by God Fields, the workplace of these miners were besieged with huge armed military presence, an atmosphere of insecurity, fear and panic has since engulfed the workers with most of them not too sure of what to expect next.

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As a consequence of the foregoing, the National Executive Council of Ghana Mineworkers (TUCG) called an emergency Council meeting at Tarkwa in the Western region of Ghana to extensively deliberate on the how to address the issue.

Meanwhile, the Union is also initiating international campaign on the matter by publishing the dossier on the matter on the various stock exchanges of the Company, petition the ILO and call international solidarity support from its sister unions in South Africa as well as other global union federations since the powers that be could not resolve the matter internally.