2024
Gold Fields Limited
Integrated Annual Report
Building a safe and respectful workplace
Protecting the health, safety and wellbeing of our people remains our number one value and is core to everything we do. Gold Fields is committed to creating safe and respectful workplaces and guaranteeing that everyone who works at Gold Fields goes home safe and well every day.
We believe that a fatality and serious injury-free business is possible, and we recognise that our responsibility extends beyond protecting the physical safety and occupational health of our people: we must ensure their psychosocial wellbeing as well.
Workforce by Group and country (end-December)
|
Total
workforce |
Employees
|
Contractors
|
Proportion of
nationals1 |
|||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 2024 | 2023 | 2024 | 2023 | 2024 | |
| Australia | 4,340 | 1,929 | 1,879 | 2,411 | 1,895 | 77% |
| South Africa | 5,266 | 2,613 | 2,582 | 2,653 | 2,574 | 89%2 |
| Ghana | 7,112 | 772 | 823 | 6,340 | 5,781 | 100% |
| Canada3 | 582 | 203 | – | 379 | – | – |
| Chile | 3,336 | 502 | 471 | 2,834 | 3,300 | 97% |
| Peru | 2,116 | 404 | 418 | 1,712 | 1,678 | 100% |
| Corporate | 138 | 137 | 124 | 1 | 1 | 58% |
| Total | 22,890 | 6,560 | 6,297 | 16,330 | 15,229 | 87% |
| 1 | Employees only |
| 2 | Most of the remaining employees are Southern African Development Community nationals |
| 3 | Apart from the total workforce, employees and contractors number for the Windfall project, these employees and contractors are excluded from all other human resource and host community indicators |
Gold Fields has a total workforce of 22,890 people across six countries – this includes our 16,330 contractors, who are critical to our success. . Our long-term focus on host community employment continues to influence our workforce profile: host community members comprise 52%RA of our workforce (2023: 51%). This aligns with our strategy of creating value for the communities in the countries Where we operate.
Key human resources metrics (end-December)
| 1 | Entry-level employee wages compared with local minimum wage. This ratio excludes Ghana, as the mines only employ management-level employees with contractor mining in use at both of our mines |
| 2 | This excludes benefits |
Safety performance
We aim to guarantee that our people go home safe and well every day. Tragically, we fell short of this commitment in 2024, and it is with profound sadness that we reported two fatalities at our operations during the year. On 2 January 2024, a South Deep employee, Khathutshelo Khaukanani, was fatally injured in an underground incident involving trackless mining equipment. A second fatal incident occurred in Australia on 23 April 2024, when Eli Kelly, who was employed by one of the mine's business partners, was fatally injured in a mobile equipment-related incident at a construction site on St Ives.
A tragic, non-operational incident also occurred off-site on a public road on 21 October 2024, where a subcontractor was fatally injured while transporting a raise bore rig from Agnew. We recorded threeRA serious injuries this year, compared to six in 2023.
We cannot claim to be a safe business until we sustainably eliminate serious injuries and fatalities across the Group. We have not yet achieved this, but we recognise the continual improvement in reducing all injuries and, in particular, reducing the number of serious injuries by over 80% since 2018.
The severity of lost time injuries (LTIs), as measured by days of work lost per millions hours, reduced to 19 days in 2024 (2023: 28 days), while the LTI duration rate declined to 29 days (2023: 45 days). Our total injury exposure, as measured by the total recordable injury frequency rate (TRIFR), deteriorated from 2.36 in 2023 to 2.62RA recordable injuries per million hours worked in 2024. The number of near misses reported during 2024 was 1,915RA (2023: 2,325).
We continue to track a set of leading and lagging indicators across all operations and projects to monitor the quality of our safety leadership, risk mitigation and response to address deviation. We also strengthened our approach to learning-from-incidents by building capacity for higher-quality incident investigations through multi-disciplinary teams. These lessons are also shared with our senior leaders.
In addition to addressing the culture and human behaviours that lead to unsafe practices, we continued to focus on engineering and technical solutions, including advanced AI, which make our operations safer and remove people from the risk exposure. This includes managing geotechnical risks, both at our underground and open-pit operations, collision avoidance technologies and utilising teleremote operations where possible.
Group safety performance (employees and contractors)
| 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fatalities | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Serious injuries1 | 3RA | 6 | 5 | 9 | 6 |
| LTIs2 | 29 | 27 | 31 | 30 | 32 |
| Total lost time injury frequency rate (LTIFR) | 0.66RA | 0.62 | 0.60 | 0.62 | 0.72 |
| Employee LTIFR | 0.78 | 1.11 | 0.64 | 0.67 | 0.91 |
| Contractor LTIFR | 0.61 | 0.44 | 0.58 | 0.59 | 0.62 |
| Total TRIFR3 | 2.62RA | 2.36 | 2.04 | 2.16 | 2.40 |
| Employee TRIFR | 3.29 | 3.68 | 2.04 | 2.35 | 2.91 |
| Contractor TRIFR | 2.39 | 4.37 | 2.04 | 2.08 | 2.13 |
| Severity rate4 | 19 | 28 | 19 | 19 | 32 |
| 1 | Since 2019, we have applied Gold Fields' definition to classify serious injuries, whereby a serious injury incurs 14 days or more of work lost and results in one of a range of injuries detailed at www.goldfields.com/safety.php |
| 2 | LTI is a work-related injury resulting in an employee or contractor being unable to attend work and perform any of their duties for one or more days after the injury |
| 3 | TRIFR = (fatalities + LTIs + restricted work injuries + medically treated injuries) x 1,000,000/number of hours worked |
| 4 | Severity rate = days lost to LTIs/hours worked x 1,000,000 |
Our safety improvement plan
Our safety improvement plan In February 2024, we initiated an independent safety diagnostic of our Group's safety leadership, processes, systems and practices to identify opportunities to accelerate our safety journey. The review by dss+ found many good practices within the Group, including key management systems and governance structures with safety integrated into most management processes. We have started to leverage these practices across our global operations. There are, however, also areas where the diagnostic emphasised areas of improvement, which related particularly to the impact of leadership, achieving greater levels of standardisation across all operations and optimising our approach to risk management.
The insights and expertise gained from our employees and business partners through the safety review served as the foundation of the safety improvement plan, which aims to eliminate fatalities and serious injuries through a multi-year, Group-wide safety programme. The plan is based on four focus areas, covering: leadership and culture; resilient risk reduction; building capability; and business partner management.
Leadership and culture
We plan to develop leaders and ensure our people truly believe in our ambition to eliminate all serious incidents, injuries and fatalities. We intend to work with leaders across all levels to demonstrate visible safety leadership and foster an environment where everyone feels trusted, valued and heard. For several years, our safety engagements served as a critical leading indicator. Typically, these range from leadership engagements to critical control verifications and peer-to-peer interactions on unsafe conditions. We are resetting the foundation for our safety engagements by deliberately focusing on Visible Felt Leadership, building capability with our leaders, providing them with the right tools to hold quality conversations, set expectations for the management of risks and enabling a culture of safe and transparent reporting.
Building on lessons from previous work, our approach to safety leadership has evolved to acknowledge that good leadership does not depend on the subject matter, but rather on the capacity of leaders being developed. We are therefore integrating our safety leadership requirements into our broader leadership development efforts.
Courageous Safety Leadership programme
In 2019, Gold Fields adopted a Courageous Safety Leadership programme across all operations to support our objective of eliminating serious injuries and fatalities. The programme intends to equip every person working at Gold Fields to become a Courageous Safety Leader by identifying unsafe approaches to work, stopping them and assisting in implementing solutions designed to ensure safe outcomes. The programme continues to be facilitated by leaders within the business and is a requirement for all employees and contractors.
To date, over 34,000 people have attended the programme – 6,100 people in 2024, including senior leaders from our Board and Executive Committee.
Resilient risk reduction
We are revisiting our processes and systems to ensure we effectively reduce risks by simplifying systems, improving controls and holding each other accountable to eliminate serious injuries and fatalities. Our desired outcomes include the following:
- Risks are actively monitored and verified to reduce our people's exposure and to boost operational resilience
- Risks are anticipated, adapted and responded to by competent risk owners
- Metrics drive heightened diligence and continuous improvement
- Learning happens from failures to prevent recurrence
We implemented a risk containment process at our operations to rapidly build our leaders' capabilities to identify risks, as well as engage in constructive conversations in the field to address those risks identified. During the year, 281 leaders across five operations completed formal risk containment training, which was conducted by an independent expert, followed by coaching on effective field engagements. We will expand this process to all operations in 2025, which will form the foundation for ongoing leadership development.
Our Group Technical team provides strong technical expertise into the design of risk controls and assurance over our catastrophic and other safety risks, and support the piloting and testing of new and advanced technologies for further risk reduction.
Managing geotechnical risks
The mining industry continues to face geotechnical challenges due to ageing of certain mines and a trend toward mining deeper pits and more complex, often deeper underground deposits. This leads to higher pit walls, more complex underground environments, increased exposure to geotechnical instability, and increased propensity for seismic damage and hydrological impacts.
The Group's geotechnical team conducts annual reviews of all geotechnical incidents and incident types at our operations to identify trends and reduce the likelihood of incident recurrence. There were 43 incidents within our open pits in 2024, a marginal improvement from 2023, notwithstanding two new pits being mined and existing pits deepening during this period. We recorded 32 geotechnical incidents in our underground mines during the year (2023: 42). Dynamically driven ground support failure accounted for 37% of these, static falls-of-ground for 43%, and backfill issues the remainder.
Our portfolio consists of deep-level mines which are seismically active due to induced stresses approaching or exceeding the strength of the rock mass. South Deep had six damaging seismic incidents in 2024, while our underground mines in Western Australia – at Granny Smith, Agnew and St Ives – recorded five events.
We aim to use industry best practices in seismological monitoring and analysis, in addition to using dynamic ground support in these operations. We further mitigate this risk through geotechnical risk management practices like improved support and standards, backfilling and stabilising pillars and, to identify seismic activity early, we perform seismic analysis and have seismic monitoring systems in place.
At South Deep, pre-conditioning is undertaken in all destress areas to fracture the rock mass ahead of work being done. Geotechnical Review Boards help implement industry best practice geotechnical design; monitoring; mine design; extraction sequencing; and ground support implementation, specifically at Cerro Corona, South Deep and Agnew.
Modernisation and mechanisation to improve safety and health
Advancements in technology continue to transform the mining industry, and safety is one of our key drivers to further modernise and mechanise activities in our mines.
The ICMM formed a partnership with the Earth Moving Equipment Safety Round Table Group to ensure safe and effective deployment of vehicle interaction and collision avoidance system (CAS) initiatives. Gold Fields opted to implement both operational and reactive controls to address vehicle interaction concerns, and is collaborating with technology suppliers to enhance system reliabilities.
As part of the operational controls, fatigue management systems are being deployed in open-pit operations. These systems are starting to improve the number of fatigue events reported, as well as operator discipline – particularly at our Ghanaian mines, which is also pioneering an ICMM-led vehicle interaction site programme.
For reactive controls, we are implementing CAS in both open-pit and underground operations. Gold Fields completed a Group Open-pit Minimum Standard, which requires that all mobile equipment entering open pits from 2026 must be fitted with an approved CAS system (level 8). Open-pit mines with a LOM beyond 2030 must upgrade this CAS functionality further to level 9 by December 2027. Underground level 9 CAS deployment at South Deep is set for completion during 2025, while the Australian mines will be piloting level 8 systems during 2025.
Work in this area includes installing more advanced detection sensors to prevent machine-to-machine or machine-to-person collisions by slowing down and then stopping the machine completely. In addition, cap lamp detectors will help prevent machine-to-person or machine-to-machine collisions by slowing down the machine and stopping it automatically.
The work on underground vehicles has been extended to ensure reduced diesel emissions through the introduction of low emission and zero emission vehicles. In finding these solutions, our teams work with our peers and equipment manufacturers via the ICMM's Innovation for Cleaner Safer Vehicles initiative. Work is progressing, but to date pilot projects at our mines have produced mixed results.
Another critical safety initiative is identifying opportunities to remove people from active mining areas via teleremote loading, rock breaking and managing underground mining activities from the surface. At South Deep, teleremote longhole stope drilling capabilities were installed, while we use teleremote load haul dump surface operations across our Australian underground mines.
Building capability
Building capability within our Company is key to the sustainability of our performance and ensuring our people feel safe enough to report and mitigate risks. In doing this, we aim to deliver the following:
- Leadership at all levels have the capabilities to actively lead and influence the organisation to reduce risks
- Our teams understand the risks in the workplace and how to react to them
- Competent safety and health professionals are actively supporting the organisation in reducing and overseeing risk reduction
Our new organisational structure includes a strengthened Group safety and health function. The safety improvement plan implementation facilitates collaboration, alignment and delivery of practical processes and systems through cross operational and functional working groups. We also established external support to coach and mentor our safety professionals.
In building the foundation, our attention will shift toward frontline supervision, understanding the barriers to effective safety management and ensuring processes are implemented to eliminate these barriers.
Business partner management
Contractors constitute 73% of our total workforce and play a critical role in helping us run our business and achieving our safety aspirations. We started developing a comprehensive framework that aligns and integrates the operations of our business partners with our values and standards. By developing this framework, we hope to:
- Set criteria to guide the decision to outsource work and the criteria for partnership
- Clearly define performance requirements, accountabilities and expectations of everyone when outsourcing work
- Build processes and systems to identify and manage high-risk exposure of work we outsourced and ensure a consistent approach to applying and verifying controls
- Build leadership and technical capabilities to manage outsourced work
- Ensure these requirements are effectively implemented, monitored and assured
Foundational work for the workforce includes integrating business partner data into our database, streamlining processes and ensuring more effective oversight and engagement.
Health and wellness
Occupational diseases
Our people are exposed to potential hazards in our workplaces that could impact their health. Typically, these hazards include noise, exposure to fumes, dust, diesel particulate matter and a range of musculoskeletal impacts. Given the diverse nature of our operations, controls at our sites are tailored in accordance with the risk that potential hazards may pose to reduce any exposures to levels that are as low as reasonably achievable.
We have the same approach to managing occupational health hazards as managing physical safety, with risk assessments as the foundation of how we design control mechanisms and the intensity of the monitoring associated with the effectiveness of those controls. We adopt a proactive approach to exposure limitation by monitoring actual exposures, with action limits set to avoid exceeding any defined occupational exposure limits.
The number of occupational disease cases recorded during 2024 decreased to 26 from 29 in 2023.
Musculoskeletal disorders made up 17 of the cases (2023: nine),
noise-induced hearing loss
threeRA
(2023: eight) and Cardio-respiratory Tuberculosis six (2023: eight). No new cases of SilicosisRA or
chronic
obstructive airway diseases were reported in 2024. All Cardio-respiratory Tuberculosis cases were
recorded at South Deep, while three musculoskeletal disorder cases occurred in Ghana, 13 in Australia and
one in Peru.
Diesel particulate matter from large machinery poses a risk to our workforce at our underground operations in South Africa and Australia. We have a targeted programme in place to reduce potential exposures, which includes filtration placed on equipment; adequate ventilation; routine maintenance of equipment; use of low sulphur fuel; and implementing operating practices that successfully reduce potential exposures over time.
During the year, 7% of personal samples exceeded the occupational exposure limit for diesel particulate matter (2023: 3%), which we are seeking to address through coordinated interventions.
Silicosis and Tuberculosis
At South Deep, airborne pollutant exposures and suppression remain a key focus area as they increase the risk of TB and Silicosis. South Deep has a TB rate of 0.1% among its employees, compared to a national average of 0.5% in South Africa.
We have automated systems in place that actively suppress dust, and we continuously monitor our controls to ensure these remain effective. Where practical, we also remove our people from areas of potential risk. Our employees are educated on the importance of dust suppression, and are equipped with the necessary personal protective equipment (PPE).
The dust suppression programme is also supported by medical screening to aid in early detection of any potential effects. In line with a continued decline in potential exposures, no new cases of Silicosis or chronic obstructive airway diseases were reported at South Deep in 2024. Furthermore, South Deep has also not had any new Silicosis cases from individuals that joined the industry after 2008 – consistent with the industry trend.
In May 2018, Gold Fields and five other South African gold companies reached a historic settlement with
claimant attorneys in a Silicosis and Tuberculosis class action. A settlement trust, known as the Tshiamiso
Trust, was established to execute the terms of the settlement and ensure all eligible current and former
mineworkers across southern Africa with Silicosis or work-related Tuberculosis (or their dependants, where
the mineworker has passed away) are compensated.
At 31 December 2024, the Trust had paid out over R2bn
(US$109m) to 21,416 industry claimants. The provision for Gold Fields' share of the settlement of the class
action claims and related costs amounted to R92m (US$5m) at year-end.
Noise-induced hearing loss
Exposure to high levels of noise from machinery and equipment present a risk of noise-induced hearing loss for our employees. New noise-induced hearing loss cases decreased slightly during the year, with two cases reported at South Deep (2023: six) and one at St Ives in Australia (2023: two). As far as reasonably possible, all new equipment purchased should not exceed noise levels of 107 dB(A), in line with the 2024 South African industry milestone.
We continue to mitigate exposure by applying engineering and administrative controls at all high
noise-emitting sources. This includes installing silencers; purchasing less noisy equipment where possible;
identifying and zoning noise areas; and providing personalised hearing protection devices to employees.
We also provide
fit-testing for hearing protection to ensure PPE is effective – it also educates our
employees
on how to fit such equipment accurately.
HIV/Aids
HIV/Aids is a particular risk for the South African population and is therefore a focus at South Deep. The percentage of HIV/Aids cases at South Deep in 2024 was 19.6% of the workforce (2023: 19.7%). By year-end-2024, 1,036 of the workforce were living with HIV/Aids, of which 1,007 are on highly active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART) treatment. The mine continues to offer voluntary counselling and testing (VCT) to prospective and permanent employees, as well as our business partners. During 2024, 5,381 counselling sessions were conducted. At South Deep employees and their immediate relatives are covered for their treatment by their medical aids. Employees who decline treatment are closely monitored and counselled on a regular basis.
HIV/Aids is less of a risk in Ghana, where the national HIV/Aids rate is below 2%. However, we offer free VCT to employees and contractors and run several educational programmes. During 2024, 35%, or 2,503 of our workforce in Ghana underwent VCT (2023: 47%) and nine workers were enrolled in HAART (2023: nine). We identified four new HIV/Aids positive cases among our Ghana workforce, bringing the number of employees living with HIV/Aids to 33.
Among South African and Ghanaian employees, 581RA were on HAART during 2024, while 64%RA of the total workforce in these countries were part of the VCT programme.
Malaria
In Ghana, our employees face a high risk of exposure to malaria. The region has a comprehensive malaria control strategy in place, which includes education initiatives, prevention, prophylaxis and treatment. We also provide mosquito repellent to our workers, support for community health facilities and rapid diagnosis and treatment. In 2024, 342RA employees (2023: 460) tested positive for malaria.
Supporting our safety transformation and preventing psychosocial harm
Our commitment to guaranteeing everyone goes home safe and well every day extends beyond physical injury to people's psychological health and emotional wellbeing. We seek to create a safe workplace where everyone feels respected, valued and empowered to speak up, and we do not tolerate any form of harassment, bullying, discrimination or harmful behaviour.
Our cultural transformation journey reflects a deep commitment to creating a workplace defined by care, respect, inclusivity, connectedness and accountability. We aspire to become a diverse and inclusive team, proudly embodying the Gold Fields values and culture. Together, we want to grow our capabilities and potential to deliver meaningful impact. This journey is focused on building leadership capability; establishing effective structures, routines and practices; ensuring our people are equipped with the appropriate skills and capabilities; and building systems, standards and processes that support collaboration and efficiency.
In 2024, our efforts centred on integrating and refining culture priorities to ensure our commitments are implemented systematically. The insights gained from the independent culture review conducted by EB&Co, along with the findings from the comprehensive independent safety review undertaken in 2024, serve as the foundation for our ongoing efforts to strengthen and evolve our culture.
We continue implementing EB&Co's recommendations, with progress built into leadership key performance indicators (KPIs) and overseen by the SET Committee. Our progress is further monitored by annual culture check-ins.
Key milestones during the year include establishing the Respectful Workplace Advisory Council to drive the implementation of recommendations from the review and provide critical guidance on advancing our culture commitments, as well as developing a tailored Respectful Workplace toolkit to assist leaders at all levels to have challenging and important conversations that underpin the respectful, caring and inclusive workplace.
For more information on how we leverage culture for improved delivery, refer to our Report to Stakeholders.
In February 2025, we published an 18-month review of the progress Gold Fields made in implementing EB&Co's recommendations. The focus was on cultural transformation, leadership accountability and meaningful structural changes that reinforce our commitment to a safer and more respectful workplace.
With most EB&Co recommendations well advanced – but some yet to meaningfully impact our people's lived experience – we are shifting focus to embedding the recommendations into our broader culture and safety workstreams. While the 21 recommendations have driven significant change, from 2025, our Respectful Workplace efforts will focus on key areas that deliver a greater impact on employees' daily experiences.
The dashboard below tracks our progress.
| Completed | On track |
Creating a diverse and inclusive workforce
At Gold Fields, we understand that harnessing diverse perspectives, experiences and attributes is a key driver of business performance. We believe a diverse and inclusive workforce enables us to deliver better outcomes and are working to create an organisation that reflects the demographics of the countries and communities in which we operate. This goal can only be realised by building a workplace culture that holds safety, wellbeing, inclusivity and respect at its core.
We made significant progress in advancing these priorities. This includes developing a clear roadmap, guided by insights and recommendations from the Respectful Workplace Advisory Council, to ensure we work in an environment where everyone contributes to Gold Fields' purpose.
Progress against our diversity and inclusion focus areas is measured through lead indicators like succession planning, risk of employee departures and other key factors that drive our workforce composition. At the end of December 2024, 25%RA of Gold Fields' employees were women, same as in 2023. The percentage of women in core mining roles rose to 56% (2023: 54%), while the percentage of women in leadership improved from 27% in 2023 to 28% in 2024. While these statistics show room for improvement, it is pleasing to see the steady increase in female representation over time: in 2016, only 16% of our workforce were women; 15% at management level and 8% in core mining roles.
The basic salary ratio for women to men was 0.95 in 2024 (2023: 0.94), reflecting our focused recruitment, retention and development of women, as well as salary adjustments where necessary.
In South Africa, legislation requires strong representation by HDPs in the workplace. South Deep is making good progress in this regard, with 80% of the workforce HDPs and 66% of senior management. Women make up 28% of South Deep's workforce, the highest level in the Group. South Deep launched a Women's Advisory Council in Q4 2024, comprising a cross-section of female employee representatives across all levels. The council will support the Employment Equity Committee to integrate our diversity aspirations and embed the Group's broader culture transformation drive.
Refining our organisational structure
On 1 July 2024, we implemented our redesigned organisational structure and transitioned from a three-layered (Group, regions, operations) structure to a two-layered (Group, operations), function-led organisational structure, which supports safe and reliable portfolio performance. The new organisational structure also provides more agility, along with stronger functional leadership, guidance and support to the operations, as our portfolio evolves to enable the delivery of our strategy. We believe the new organisational structure will drive standardised ways of working and provide agility and growth opportunities that can leverage the experience of our people across the Group. Our operations will be empowered to focus on their core mandate of safe, reliable, cost-effective production driven by a single, united global team that works collaboratively towards shared goals.
Talent and leadership development
The changes to our organisational structure served as a strategic opportunity to review and optimise existing talent, ensuring that the right individuals and new capabilities are aligned with future structural needs. We conducted a comprehensive talent review of our senior leaders to equip the Group for sustained growth and success. We also reviewed how we measure, recognise and reward our people for their performance to drive our desired business outcomes and the culture we seek to foster.
Under the new organisational structure, talent is managed by discipline based on role-specific requirements that have now been standardised across the Group. This defines career pathways by discipline and presents cross-disciplinary opportunities, and will be implemented in 2025. A key focus area will be on building line manager capability to manage performance and talent.
We believe that our training and development programmes continue to attract new talent and develop the skills required by an evolving mining landscape, including increasingly mechanised, modernised and automated mines. In 2024, we invested US$1,930 per employee in training (2023: US$1,400).
Attracting and retaining our talent remains a focus area as we continue to build our brand and employee benefits. Critical role turnover for the Group was 7% in 2024, against a target of 5%, but an improvement on the previous years. Our Western Australian operations in particular had high turnover levels of 13% amid retention challenges in a fiercely competitive skills market. Factors influencing the workforce in Australia include skills shortages in crucial job categories and the mobile nature of the fly-in, fly-out workforce.
We recognise the important role of leadership and continued to implement our leadership development programme for senior managers, middle managers and graduates during the year, and are working towards a new supervisory development programme to enhance our overall leadership effectiveness in 2025. In doing this, we can equip our leaders with the capabilities needed to manage people, processes and systems to realise our 2035 aspirations safely and predictably.
Integrating Windfall employees into the Group
In May 2023, we partnered with Osisko Mining to develop and mine the underground Windfall project in Québec, Canada through a 50/50 JV. This year, we completed a transaction to acquire Osisko Mining to give Gold Fields 100% ownership of the Windfall project and the extensive surrounding exploration camps. The transaction marked an important step in our journey to continue improving the quality of our portfolio. While the creation of the JV enabled the Gold Fields and Osisko Mining teams to familiarise themselves and learn to work together, the focus since the acquisition has been on fully integrating the Windfall team into Gold Fields. This has been supported by the recent organisational structure changes, which connected our Windfall team members to their broader functional colleagues.
Organised labour
We continue to uphold our employees' rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining, and ensure our contractors also abide by these standards.
Trade union membership among our employees is as follows:
- South Africa: 74%
- Ghana: 0% employees and an estimated 46% of contractors
- Chile: 67% of employees and 0% of contractors
- Peru: 22% of employees and 0% of contractors
In accordance with legislative requirements, we do not collect data around union representation for our employees or contractors in Australia. We have enterprise agreements in place with most of our employees, effective until June 2026. Our senior employees have individual employment contracts
In February 2024, South Deep concluded a two-year extension to its three-year wage agreement with organised labour. The mine has a stable labour relations environment with its representative trade unions, particularly the National Union of Mineworkers, of which about 75% of the workforce are members.
Our employees in Ghana are currently not unionised and union membership among the largely contracted workforce is close to half.
In Chile, the mining industry has the highest level of unionisation. At Salares Norte, a new labour agreement was signed in July 2023, which updated the conditions and benefits at the site until July 2025.
Our Peruvian operations were impacted by increased trade union activities – often resulting from restructuring – and new labour laws. At Cerro Corona, we were still operating under our three-year labour agreement concluded in October 2022.
