Special Hearings — Business Hearings — 1997-11-13

MR KOMAMA: If I may just give Paul Benjamin about two or three minutes to give a real experience of what he saw of workers who had died in that situation.  Paul?

MR BENJAMIN: In September 1986 I travelled with a pathologist to the mortuary at Springs.  Looking for the district surgeon we open an unmarked door.  In front of us were piled the bodies of 32 Black mine workers.  They have been transported to the mortuary in a cool drink truck.
 They were some of the 177 mine workers killed in the Kinross accident who'd been identified by the mining death as Sotho 45 Shangaan, in brackets Mozambican 21, Pondo 20 etcetera.
 The image of those corpses embodies for me the brutality of the South African work place.  The health and safety record of our employers shows the capital with no shrinking violate.  Employers actively sought and exploited every inch of latitude alerted by an anti-worker in an anti-union and racist Government.
 Employers used their powers to exclude Black workers from participation in health and safety.  In the aftermath of Kinross, the mine and the Government were more concerned to prevent the NUM asking questions at an inquiry.
 I find it quite extraordinary that to this day, the mine has not apologised for this conduct and Cyril Ramaphosa who I saw in the audience earlier, would find the explanations for Kinross's conduct under those circumstances, which included an application to the Appellate Division, quite extraordinary.
 They were all directed at preventing a Black, a representative of Black workers asking questions about the cosy relationship between employers and the state.
 Kinross was not an ...(indistinct) pattern of exclusion, it was repeated time and time again in many worse ways and away from the public eye.  The Mining Industry sought and it was granted an approach to health and safety based on self regulation.  It wasn't forced to do what it did by law.
 The industry was allowed to police itself in respect of major hazard, with disastrous consequences.  The Leon Commission in 1995 said that the industry had failed to regulate itself in a responsible manner.  This failure (indistinct) with the deliberate suppression of information, has caused, for instance, the epidemic of asbestos related diseases that has been so graphically described in the press this week.
 The approach to health and safety as been indicated, is closely linked to the migrant labour system.  Within that framework the industry made many deliberate choices.  One of them was that it was cheaper to allow people often to be sick than to prevent the conditions that created that sickness.
 If one looks at the history of the suppression of dust in the Mining Industry, the failure to do so and the immense and quite unknown epidemic that we are now experiencing in rural areas, one will say that the industry made a choice that was alerted by the migrant labour system, because when workers got sick from lung diseases, you could send them home with two or three thousand rand in their pockets and hire somebody else.
 The law did not force those attitudes.  Racial discrimination remained an active part of health and safety legislation.  Till 1977 Black workers who were injured, the families of Black workers who were killed in accidents, didn't receive those pensions.  
 Many of those workers are alive today, having lived for 20 years, often unemployable, on a small lump sum.  Those are the workers perhaps that we need to address in looking at how reparation will be done and how reconciliation will be achieved.
 The neglect was not confined to the Mining Industry.  It is a (indistinct) irony that we can focus on the Mining Industry, because we know more, although not enough, about its health and safety record.
 Other sectors of the economy are worse.  It's a pity, for instance, that the agricultural industry has chosen not to come.  They might like to explain the study done at UCT recently, which we've put in our papers, indicating that in fact only 15 percent of fatal accidents in rural areas get reported to the relevant Government authorities.
 The full extent of the consequences of these heath epidemics is only now beginning to be documented and in particular we refer the Commission to the work referred to in our full submissions of Dr Neil White and others, who've attempted for the first time to document the full extent of disease caused in - by mining and now present in epidemic proportions in rural communities.
 The industry resisted independent enquiry until 1994.  One of the tragedies perhaps of the Leon Commission, that it came so late.  It could have come ten years earlier and a lot of its reforms could have come earlier.
 Impressive reforms have been introduced.  The Mining Industry has achieved a new framework through tripartite negotiation of which all three social partners are proud, but one must remember is that new framework for future regulation is not addressing the problem of the uncompensated injured, the uncompensated widows and children who suffered under discriminatory compensation system and the many many sick workers which has been -  which our submissions do refer to in full.
 This is perhaps one of the aspects of what Adrian du Plessis referred to as the human suffering caused by the Mining Industry and by other sectors and as yet one has not seen any attempt to address that full suffering as part of the request for reconciliation.  Thank you.

<UNKNOWN>: Just, Dr Randera, the - I don't want to stretch your patience, but just to say that we were - we asked a worker to write a concluding summary, because I think that will give an impact of what it's about and maybe as Charles say one or two words.
 If Mesa could come over to do that (indistinct) for that worker and we would be really - we really apologise that we took a longer period, but I think if you take account of the human suffering that people have gone through, we really appreciate that.  So, Charles, one or two words and then Mr Mesa ... (intervention).