More than 1,000 jobs are on the line at De Beers’ Limpopo diamond mine after the company halted production earlier this week, according to the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM).The labour union warned that 1,134 permanent employees at the Venetia mine, and 80 employees at De Beers Sightholder Sales South Africa (DBSSSA), the group’s sorting facility in Joburg, stand to lose their jobs in a looming wave of retrenchments.De Beers declined to comment on the number of retrenchments while it is engaged in the retrenchment consultation process, having issued a section 189A notice on Monday.The Anglo American-owned miner announced on Monday that it will halt production at Venetia, its only South African mine, for the next two years to cut costs.Venetia, the diamond giant’s only mine in South Africa, employs about 3,500 people and accounts for about a tenth of the group’s output. It is the biggest diamond supplier by value in South Africa, accounting for 40% of production. (Dorothy Kgosi) The two-year hiatus is meant to allow the group to focus its spending on the mine’s $2.3bn underground expansion, which has been ongoing since 2015.But the sudden turn to sweeping layoffs in a market that has been in steady decline for decades has drawn outrage from union leaders.“Workers cannot be treated as disposable tools that are discarded whenever companies face economic pressures,” NUM diamond sector chief negotiator Masibulele Naki said in a statement on Tuesday.“De Beers has known about the challenges confronting the diamond market for a long time. It is therefore disingenuous to present this announcement as a sudden crisis.“Workers and their trade union should have been engaged honestly and transparently long before a section 189A notice was issued.”The growing popularity of synthetic diamonds, thanks largely to their lower price tags, has seen natural stones plunge in value over the past decade, shaving more than $10bn off De Beers’ estimated value since 2011.Amid plunging prices, De Beers has seen its value written down three times in the past three and a half years by parent company Anglo.The pause at Venetia also comes five months after De Beers paused an expansion project in Canada, citing prolonged weakness in diamond markets.The stage is set for a tense round of negotiations with unions, who accuse the group of turning to retrenchments as an “easy escape route” in the face of operational challenges.“We remind the employer that section 189A consultations are legally intended to seek alternatives to job losses, not merely rubber-stamp decisions already taken,” said Naki.The NUM called for De Beers to consider a review of executive and management costs or a reduction in nonessential expenditure instead. It called on the departments of mineral & petroleum resources and of employment and labour to get involved and stem job losses.“The NUM will not be shocked if this is a strategy by the company to replace permanent workers with contractors (which is being used by mining companies around the world),” said Naki.Business Day