COSATU statement on mine tragedies 03-09-07

 

COSATU statement on mine tragedies

The Congress of South African Trade Unions sends its condolences to the families and fellow workers of the four mine workers who lost their lives, and sends its best wishes to the five seriously injured workers, at Anglogold Ashanti's Mponeng mine in Carletonville, due to a seismic event on 28 September 2007.

It is a grim coincidence that this latest disaster in the industry should have happened just before the annual commemoration of one of the greatest tragedies in the long and blood-stained history of South African mine workers, at the No 2 Shaft at the Kinross gold mine at Evander, on 16 September 1986, when a fire broke out which left 177 dead and 235 injured.

In protest at what proved to have been an avoidable disaster, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) called a national work stoppage for 1 October, and those who died have been commemorated on this date ever since.

An NUM pamphlet, A thousand ways to die, printed just before the accident, criticised safety precautions in the mines. It estimated that from the beginning of the 20th century up to 1986, 46 000 workers had died and over a million been seriously injured. Mine workers' lives were cheap in apartheid South Africa.

As the pamphlet said: "The mines use threats and punishments to make the work go faster. If workers stop because the working place in not safe, they may get charged - and sometimes even fired. The fear of punishment makes workers take more chances - and when workers take more chances they have more accidents."

Labour relations in the mines have improved since those days but far too many of the safety problems which led to the Kinross disaster remain today. There are still far too many deaths and injuries which could be averted with better safety precautions.

It is not only accidents that are claiming mineworkers' lives, as illustrated by the case of ten former employees who are seeking compensation from Anglo American for exposing them to working conditions that have led to them contracting occupation-related debilitating lung diseases - silicosis, or phthisis (silicosis and tuberculosis) - which have caused pain and suffering, and in two of the ten cases, death.

The eight who remain and the widows of the two have brought a test case to the Johannesburg high court, where they are claiming R20 million in compensation.

The workers argue that Anglo American knew that silica dust inhalation could cause debilitating lung diseases and that the company could have prevented them from contracting the disease if they had installed proper health and safety measures, including issuing masks and providing proper washing facilities for black miners.

They also allege that the company knew that levels of silica underground were frequently at such high levels that they posed a health risk to miners, and that preventive measures and required standards were consistently ignored, flouted or denied.

Should they win this could have huge implications for the estimated one million workers who have left the industry over the last 20 years, about half of whom re believed to be living with theses diseases. Their lawyer, Richard Meeran, says that "due to the vast number of victims and the nature and circumstances of their disease, the case has significant implications, domestically, for South African workers and industry, and internationally for victims of multinationals".

Government research has shown that between 26%-31% percent of former miners living in Thamanga village in Botswana, and between 22%-37% of those living in Libode in the Eastern Cape, had silicosis. "Generalising these rates to an estimated 2 million former miners living in southern Africa produces an astonishing 480 000 cases of pneumoconiosis."

Meeran says that "Given the flagrant disregard shown in the past towards the health of black workers, and the ongoing suffering of thousands of victims, it is incumbent on the gold mining industry to establish these schemes without further delay."

We owe it to all these workers, and to the memory of those 177 workers at Kinross, the four at Mponeng and thousands of other who have died, to do everything in our power to save lives and create a safe and healthy working environment in the mines. The Departments of Minerals and Energy and Labour must step up their efforts to enforce the safest possible working environments.