National Union of Mineworkers (NUM)
How these positions were derived
Every stance on this page is AI-derived from parliamentary and public records — committee transcripts, submissions, and published statements — and each carries the one-line reason the model gave for it. They are a research starting point, not a position an organisation has confirmed. Verification is tiered. 235 of 451 stance records have been verified, and 37 corrected, by a paired AI review — two independent AI reviewers per actor plus an adjudicator — that checked each stance for coherence against the actor’s recorded brief and the idea text. That check did not reach back to primary parliamentary sources, so an AI-verified badge means internally consistent, not independently confirmed. A corrected row shows the revised position, with the originally recorded stance and the adjudicator’s reason inspectable on its badge. The distinct top tier is human review: 0 of 451 stance records across the whole site have been checked by a human reviewer, and a human review always outranks the AI tiers. None have yet. Human-reviewed rows get their own badge as soon as they exist; the 179 rows with neither badge are the model’s unchecked call.
Stakeholder brief
Primary interests
Mining employment security and worker safety; just transition pace that protects coal-dependent community livelihoods; collective bargaining rights in energy and mining sectors; wage growth for 200,000+ members across mining, energy, and construction sectors.
Key concerns
Accelerated coal phase-out without adequate income support, skills retraining, and community economic diversification; renewable energy job quality — IPP employment contracts may not offer equivalent wages and job security to Eskom employment; transition timeline pressures from JETP that exceed community absorption capacity.
What they bring
Deep knowledge of coal community economic structures and dependency patterns; shop-floor understanding of energy transition feasibility constraints; mobilisation capacity for legitimate transition processes; constituency buy-in critical for Eskom operational continuity during restructuring.
Conditions for engagement
Just transition fund with dedicated skills retraining and income support; coal community economic diversification plans with government commitments and measurable milestones; minimum labour standards in IPP and concessioning contracts; meaningful stakeholder consultation before major restructuring decisions.
Reform design insight
The pace of coal transition must be matched by the pace of alternative livelihood development in affected communities. NUM's concerns are not anti-reform — they surface legitimate distributional questions about who bears transition costs. Reform designs should sequence transition milestones with community support program delivery, not treat them as independent workstreams. A just transition fund with community-level spending plans is a reform prerequisite, not an add-on.
Recorded positions
26 positions across 5 reform packages. Split between conditions and objections.
6
Support
10
Conditional
10
Oppose
0
Neutral
Two scales are in play. The engagement posture above (Cautious) is one actor-level judgement, the axis the feasibility simulator scores. These four counts are the separate per-idea scale: support reads as champion, conditional reads as constructive critic, oppose reads as concerned, neutral has no posture counterpart at all — the posture scale has no neutral. An actor’s posture and its per-idea positions can disagree, and where they do the disagreement is the point.
Stance portfolio
Grouped by reform package, then by the binding constraint each idea addresses. The line under every title is the reason the stance was assigned.
Package 1: Infrastructure Unblock
15 ideas1 support6 conditional8 oppose- ConditionalAI-corrected
Brief names JETP timeline pressures as a concern, calls a just transition fund a reform prerequisite and states NUM is not anti-reform; opposing the funding instrument it demands misreads the record. Conditional matches NUM's idea-35 pattern.
Agreement & opposition
Scored only on ideas both actors hold a recorded position on. Identical positions score +1, support against opposition −1, support against conditional +0.5, and any pair involving a neutral 0. The figure shown is the mean over the shared ideas. Pairs sharing fewer than 5 ideas are not scored — a one-idea overlap produces a perfect agreement that means nothing.
Most aligned
- COSATU+0.81Near-identical positions8 shared ideas of 26 · 7 agree · 1 clash
- NERSA+0.70Mostly aligned5 shared ideas of 26 · 4 agree · 1 clash
- DTIC (Dept. of Trade, Industry & Competition)+0.63Mostly aligned8 shared ideas of 26 · 7 agree · 1 clash
- Eskom+0.14Little in common14 shared ideas of 26 · 6 agree · 7 clash
Data as of 2026-08-24 · latest PMG meeting 2026-08-21