Special Hearings — Business Hearings — 1997-11-13

MR GODSELL: Yes, I think these are your words.  I think Adrian has said very clearly that this industry was shaped and shaped at the racial politics of our past and that's emphatically so and cannot in any way be denied.
 I think the relationship between the State and Mining Industry was perhaps a little more complex than your words suggest.  I think there's pretty solid evidence and well academically documented evidence that for example there was a lot of opposition to the industrial colour bar from very early stages.
 This monopoly of skills in the hands of at first a few imported White artisans and then a newly urbanising Afrikaner class, didn't actually serve the interests of the company.
 So, I think there are elements of quite important conflict and indeed as Adrian has indicated, this is an industry that has opposed the industrial colour bar, because it was detrimental to the industry throughout the 125 years of its history.
 But again, as Adrian has said, that this industry didn't at an earlier stage and more effectively and more emphatically opposed the full context of racist laws, is clearly stated and clearly acknowledged and the industry and the country are paying the price for this.
 I mean, a very important price that we are paying is that our mines are actually ill prepared to go out into global markets and compete with other mining industries elsewhere in the world because of the racist structure of our work force, because of the unnatural pattern of development that has flowed from our past history.

RUSSELL ALLY: Just to (indistinct) the question of the detrimental impact of the laws on the Mining Industry.  There is another argument and this goes way back and I'd just like your opinions on it, is that it was precisely because of the - that the nature of the Mining Industry, the quality of the oar, the low quality of the oar, the deep level nature, which makes South Africa's Mining Industry in many instance unique;  that ultra cheap, ultra exploited labour which happened to be Black, given the history of the country, was indispensable.
 That if this kind of industry had been - or kind of mining had been discovered, let's say in Australia, at the same time as it was discovered in South Africa, it would not have been possible to develop it to the extent that it was developed in South Africa, because you would not have had the same kind of ultra cheap, ultra exploitable Black labour.
 Is that fair?

MR GODSELL: Well, it's certainly a point of view, but you know, one can only speculate.  Next door to Australia, there were vast hordes of unskilled labour, people who could have offered manual labour and it's quite interesting to note that labour recruitment difficulties were so tough at one point, that in fact people were imported into the South African mines from Asia.
 So one can speculate with some interest I guess as to whether the quality of all reserve had been found in Australia that warranted it, whether it could have been imports from across the seas, with vast numbers of unskilled manual labourers.  But that's speculation.

RUSSELL ALLY: Let's pull a bit further away from those early beginnings to later period.  There is an accusation that precisely because this was Black labour and because of the nature of the racism, in fact, that Black lives were considered to be expendable, that the Mining Industry did compromise when it came to questions of safety.
 One of the examples often used is Kinross, where there was an argument that materials were used which in other areas - which had internationally been declared not safe for mining because of its high combustibility and so forth, but because the labour force was Black, the Mining Industry believed that they could actually get away with these - with this slackness in safety standards.
 This has led to enormous casualties and some of it could have been avoided.  How would you respond to that?

MR GODSELL: Yes, I would offer you two contrasting responses.  Firstly, I think that a suggestion that management in the Mining Industry had deliberately chosen unsafe methods of mining rather than safe methods of mining, is one I would absolutely reject.
 I think it's, apart from anything else, it suggests that there is only one colour of people who work underground.  It's, I think, a strange and a thoroughly wrong headed suggestion and I don't want to talk about Kinross, because that's a specifically event subject to two commissions of enquiry.
 That's the first response.  The second response I think is in a way more interesting and more important.  It turns on the question of how safe is safe.  Who has the judgement to decide whether this material or this method of hoisting or continuing to mine in this particular (indistinct), whether that is a safe practise.
 I think at the heart of the Leon Commission and at the heart of the new mine, health and safety act, is a recognition that that responsibility cannot be the responsibility of management alone.
 That the judgement about how safe is safe, is to be a judgement shared between management and labour and indeed in the context of a tripartite management labour government system which generates regulations, which generates in our mines specific risk assessments, where a deliberate view is taken of the risks that can be taken and the risks that cannot be taken and where workers are actually in a daily way involved in the inspection and making judgements about safe working places.
 In terms of this act, workers and their unions have the capacity to withhold work where they believe it is unsafe.  This is something that the employers in the Chamber of Mines have solidly supported.  The Leon Commission was a joint call from the national union of mine workers and the Chamber of Mines and I think ultimately the only way that one can respond to the question of how safe is safe, is to ensure that the right people, that is the people who are directly affected by these decisions are taking those decisions.

RUSSELL ALLY: There's a charge often levelled against the Mining Industry that until the 1960's at least, maybe even a bit further along the line, but certainly until the 1960's that Black wages in real terms were probably lower than what they had been in the earlier part of the century and that is was deliberately through the policies of the Chamber of Mines, which had the monopoly.
 This monopolist control could fix wages because it was in the interest of the Mining Industry obviously not to compete with each other in terms of wages and because of the Chamber and its abilities to ensure that there was that co-operation, you were able to not only fix wages in that way, but that one didn't see any substantial increase in real terms in wages.
 It was only once the trade unions themselves began to  - or worker began to agitate, that there was action.