Why is labour strife so persistent in South Africa's mining industry?

In January 2014, over 70,000 mineworkers on South Africa's Platinum Belt embarked on an unprecedented five-month long labour strike, only 18 months after the Marikana tragedy of August 2012. Informed by the empirical evidence, this paper argues that a two-level game analysis best explains the protracted, frequent and violent nature of labour strikes that have characterised South Africa's mining industry since 2011. An evolutionary 'Hawk-Dove' game is used to model industrial labour relations at 'Level I'. It shows that competition between labour unions at 'Level II' - modelled by a 'Chain-Store-Paradox' game - changed the dynamics of the 'Level I' game over time, eroding the mutual cooperation that had previously existed. Under the payoff structures of inflexible institutional arrangements, mutual cooperation gave way to a perennial Prisoner's Dilemma. Mining firms and incumbent unions have a high-powered incentive to pursue a collectively destructive but individually rational aggressive 'Hawk' strategy. This leads to underperformance in South Africa's mining industry, at significant cost to social welfare. One important policy implication is that the institutional arrangements governing labour should be transformed to minimise the incentive for unions to play an aggressive strategy.