SOUTH AFRICA-ECONOMY: Model Safety Laws For Deadly Mines

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Eddie Koch

JOHANNESBURG, Apr 29 1996 (IPS) - When workers from the mountain kingdom of Lesotho leave their village homes and cross the Mohokare River into South Africa to work on the gold mines, they sing a mournful song preparing themselves for the dangers that lie ahead.

“Mohokare, I assume another blanket now that I have crossed you… Wash me clean… Make me a man who is fit to go to heaven… Because I am going to the dangerous place where I may lose my life… Prepare me for death,” the song says.

South Africa’s mines are currently among the most hazardous in the world. But the South African government is set to revamp outmoded safety laws in a bid to protect the lives of the migrant labourers and thousands of others who work on South Africa’s mines.

A draft of a new health and safety bill for the industry has been thrashed out it in a series of trilateral talks over the last few months between organised labour, mineowners and government officials, and will be submitted to parliament early next month.

The revolutionary law includes clauses that members of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) have waged a decade-long struggle to have implemented and is designed to put an end to avoidable accidents.

It will allow workers to participate in a state-of-the-art system for managing underground accidents and mine owners will be forced by law to prevent events like those that led to grisly death of 104 workers at the Vaal Reefs mine near Johannesburg last year.

The imminent legislative change reflects a profound shift in the amount of power that mine owners are able to wield over government policy since the country’s first democratic elections in April 1994.

Since then a number of NUM leaders have been pushed into high office. Nelson Mandela is honorary president of the union. Marcel Golding, head of the parliamentary portfolio committee that brokered the new bill, is a former assistant general secretary. Chief constitutional negotiator, Cyril Ramaphosa, was its general secretary.

This political change has placed intense pressure on mine owners to negotiate the replacement of the archaic health and safety system that still operates on the mines.

One of its most controversial provisions states that, in the case of a fatal accident, an individual mine manager will be charged with homicide unless he can prove that every reasonable and practical step was taken to prevent the causes of such an incident.

“The bill explicitly shifts the burden onto a mine manager to prove he is innocent because of the enormous responsibility these officials have for protecting the lives of thousands of workers,” says Fleur Plimmer, coordinator of the NUM’s health and safety unit.

“It is a matter of principal for us. If this law applied at the time of the Vaal Reefs accident, the mine managers would have been obliged to prove they did everything possible to prevent the accident.”

The country’s large mining corporations are strongly opposed to the “reversal of onus” clause and are considering a constitutional court challenge if parliament keeps it in when the law is passed on grounds that it contravenes the basic right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.

“If an offence is committed by a member of staff then the manager and owner of the mine is presumed guilty of the same offence. In its current form the bill gives more rights to a common criminal, robber or rapist than it does to a mine manager,” says John Stewart, head of safety management at the Chamber of Mines.

Apart from this fundamental disagreement, the draft law is a “consensual product” of intense bargaining and negotiation between unions, the major mining houses and the department of mineral and energy affairs.

It provides for:

* Elected health and safety representatives who will participate in all safety management systems on mines. Workers will also be able to elect a full-time health and safety representative who will carry out this task with full pay.

* Joint health and safety committees made up of elected workers and senior management officials with the power to implement policy decisions.

* The right of workers to a free-flow of information about risk assessment, accident statistics, codes of practice, accident inquiries and occupational disease statistics.

* The right of workers to refuse to work if they have “reasonable justification” to believe a serious danger is present.

* A revamped mines inspectorate which will, in effect, create an expanded government agency made up of people experienced in occupational health and industrial hygiene to monitor the way the new law is implemented.

* A mandatory system of risk assessment on every mine in which management is obliged to identify potential hazards and design system to minimise the risk in a way that ensures benefits outweigh the costs.

* Hazard awareness training for workers before they start employment, at regular intervals and before any major changes to the production process.

The bill’s clauses are not as poetic as the haunting song that migrant workers sing on their journey to the mines but they will help to ensure that these men, protected by a new legislative blanket, no longer have to leave their homes with a feeling of fatalism in their hearts.

Says Plimmer: “From having a really weak system we are now on the verge of implementing some of the best legislation to protect the lives of workers in the world.”

Adds Stewart: “It is fully up-to-date legislation in line with a recent International Labour Organisation convention on mine safety that has yet to be ratified. In that context, without having studied all other mine safety legislation, we must surely rank among the most progressive in the world.”

While the new law is being printed so that it can be tabled in parliament, a judicial commission of inquiry into last year’s accident at Vaal Reefs — where 104 workers were crushed to death when an underground locomotive plunged down a shaft into a lift bringing workers to the surface — recommended the company and senior management officials be charged with culpable homicide.

The latest finding contrasts dramatically with the judicial outcome of the 1986 accident at Kinross that killed 173 people in the worst tragedy in the history of gold mining in South Africa.

Management was exonerated and a welder was convicted on two minor counts of breaching the Mines and Works Act and fined 100 rand (about 23 dollars) — less than 15 cents for each life lost.

“It (the Vaal Reefs judgement) is the first occasion in the history of mine accidents that I know of in which a mine manager has been held to account for the causes of a disaster,” says Plimmer. “Together with the mine’s health and safety bill it will help to end the culture of victim blaming that has so far characterised accident inquiries.”