Introduction
Matters of Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) are often sidelined in labour studies. The state of OHS1 is seen as a technical matter in the domain of employee relations, and the broader context of the political economy within which it is located is thus often ignored. Yet this context is crucial for understanding safety and health in South African mining from a worker-oriented perspective. Focusing on subcontracting, illegal mining and inter-union rivalry, this article explores how these three aspects of the broader context, external to the immediate production environment, fundamentally impact on OHS in the mining workplace. The focus is contemporary. As health and safety issues in South African mining can be tracked back over a century, however, a brief historical note is in order.
The modern South African economy was built on the expendability of the lives of black African migrant mineworkers. This industrial army was housed in single-sex compounds and worked long hours from 1911 to 1997 (Stewart 2016) with no real wage increases from 1911 to 1970 (Wilson 1972). More broadly, the movements of migrant mineworkers, as well as those of all black people in South Africa, were restricted by the colonial, segregationist and apartheid states. This migratory labour system has long been the broad context within which the trajectory of the South African political economy has been viewed (Allen 2003, 3–75). Over a century of social dislocation of families aside, harsh working conditions, with deleterious consequences in respect of diseases such as silicosis, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS and a poor health and safety record (see Hermanus 2007; Walters et al. n.d., vol. 2, 130–131), characterised the migrant labour system.
Mineworkers’ initial response to working conditions was desertion (Van Onselen 1976; Moroney 1977). Wage increases and production bonuses for ‘hammer boys’, and improved medical facilities did, however, follow a black mineworkers’ strike in 1913 (Bonner 1979). After the 1920 black mineworkers’ strike was put down and the first formal attempts at unionisation in the 1940s were crushed following the major 1946 strike, resistance to the hazards of mining life appears to have been individualised from the 1950s onwards (Nite and Stewart 2012).
In the early 1980s OHS became the central motif around which the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) mobilised (Leger 1985). Shortly after its formation in 1982, for instance, the NUM published health and safety guidelines for union organisers under the slogan of its first organising campaign ‘Organise or die’ (NUM n.d.). By sustaining this OHS focus, the result was the promulgation of the Mine Health and Safety Act of 1996. In short, the issue of OHS was central to the rise of the NUM. The success of the NUM was, in turn, central to the long struggle for democracy in South Africa.
Understanding the trajectory of OHS on South African mines and the drive to improve injury and fatality measures has been restricted to the domain of production relations and issues within the workplace. The argument here is to interrogate how local external factors impact on occupational health and safety. At stake is nothing less than a more complete understanding of the factors which directly impact on workplace OHS, in the interests of advancing a steady and sustained improvement in the endemic vicissitudes of mine and worker safety and workers’ health.
This article has four sections. The first contextualises the argument by tracing a worker-oriented perspective of the politics of health and safety in the South African mining industry. The second and third sections provide evidence of how the rise of subcontracting and the emergence of illegal mining impacted on the health and safety culture and climate in South African mining prior to the watershed events at Marikana, which saw miners shot down by police, with a level of force reminiscent of apartheid-era massacres (Alexander 2013; Dlangamandla et al. 2013; Capps 2015). The final section draws in the third external factor, and explains how, after Marikana, the major realignment of union membership, resulting in intensive inter-union rivalry, affected the functioning of the mining OHS regime. In each case, we show the impact on the institutional mechanisms that contribute to maintaining and improving health and safety standards. A fourth factor, also external to production matters and with profound implications for workers’ long-term health, deserves separate treatment and is hence not discussed here, namely the impact of HIV/AIDS and silicosis (see Jochelson, Mothibeli, and Leger 1991; Dickinson 2004; Molapo 2012; Walters et al. n.d.). The article concludes by pointing to the implications of the argument for worker politics and progressive research practice.
Theoretically, we situate our argument within the political economy tradition, with specific reference to Bob Jessop (2008), who argues that historical materialist analyses could be assisted by reworking key concepts of Niklas Luhmann's analysis of self-organising (autopoietic) systems. Viewing the mine safety management system as a self-organising, operationally closed, but communicatively open system, the relation between worker health and safety representatives and the safety management system has been analysed by Coulson and Christofides (2019). This analysis details how the mine health and safety management system has distinguished workplace production and safety on the one hand, from compliance and enforcement on the other. This has effectively separated the politics of production from the political capital–labour relation environment. Worker health and safety representatives have consequently been severely constrained in being able to challenge the source of safety dysfunctions in production itself, or escalating their safety concerns to the union/management and political levels.
Developing this insight, only noted here, suggests the relation between external environmental factors and the self-organising health and safety management system is obscured. Narrowly conceived as restricted to the workplace, the OHS system has traditionally operated in isolation from its broader external social and political environment. Conceptually, the negative impact of external environmental factors on the mechanisms of the OHS system has been precluded from consideration within the operationally closed safety management system. In Luhmannian terms (1989, 15–21), there is no interactive ‘resonance’ between the autopoietic OHS system and its external environment beyond the workplace. Such ‘noise’ in the broader environment is necessary to communicate and address the dysfunctions of any self-organising, autopoietic system – as unionisation did to ensure black workers won a formal voice within the mine safety management system in the 1980s.
Methodologically, our analysis is based on a number of surveys of trade union members in the mining industry conducted from the late 1990s onwards. These were detailed, broad-ranging audits of health and safety structures, designed to assess members’ views, perceptions and attitudes regarding their union, commissioned by the NUM (see Bezuidenhout et al. 1998, 2005, 2015; Bezuidenhout, Bischoff, and Masondo 2010); a 2014 survey of members’ attitudes to a wide range of issues and concerns in unions affiliated at the time to the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU); and a study commissioned by the Mine Health and Safety Council on workers’ perspectives and practices regarding their Right to Refuse to do Dangerous Work (Stewart, Coulson, and Bakker 2013). All the studies combined qualitative and quantitative research methodologies. In addition, both together and separately, the authors have conducted numerous field trips and visits to mines and mining communities over the past two decades, which included the use of ethnographic research methodologies.
The politics of health and safety
The South African mining industry has a violent history. Brute force and systematic assaults ensured continued underground production under a system of wage-constraint that capped wages to prevent competition between mines for black African workers. This was the ‘maximum average system’ (Moodie 2005), which effectively institutionalised a regime of physical coercion and violence by the exclusion of black workers from independent decision making and the absence of incentives (except for rock drillers). It further entrenched and indeed significantly contributed to the racialised colonial despotism over disenfranchised and unorganised workers (Burawoy 1985; see also Moodie and Ndatshe 1994). Significantly, rock drillers, currently referred as the Rock Drill Operators (RDOs), located at the cutting edge of mining production, were exempt from the ‘maximum average system’ and could earn production bonuses. The RDOs are not only able to stop production, but also to control the pace of work of the rest of the mine. They continue to suffer the worst OHS record and ‘the worst features’ of the migratory labour system (Hartford 2013, 161). Significantly, it was the RDOs, the ‘kings of the mine’, who came to dominate the events at Marikana (see Stewart 2013).
Institutionalised violence in mining production was only brought to an end in the mid 1960s, giving way to the ‘scientific’ Paterson job-grading and remuneration system. Physical violence was officially proscribed and production bonuses were generalised. Anglo American, in particular, took steps, not entirely successfully, to classify assaults in an attempt to eliminate physical violence in its mines.
From the 1980s onwards, however, the NUM was able to appreciably limit physical assaults as the union established representation for workers for the first time since 1946. It commissioned worker-oriented health and safety research, the findings of Jean-Patrick Leger (1985) serving to further support the union's mobilisation around the lack of adequate health and safety conditions in the industry, and which drew many into its ranks. This did not, however, immediately result in any dramatic shift in the improvement of the injury and fatality rates.
The meteoric rise of the NUM and the sustained pressure it applied, particularly around issues of OHS, saw the adoption of the Mining Health and Safety Act (MHSA) of 1996 and for which it was primarily responsible (Hermanus 1999). In terms of the MHSA, all mining firms, not only those subject to union power, were required to institute a system of employee representation. The system of inspections by a state inspectorate was further entrenched, as were systematic medical monitoring and inspections. Importantly, mining firms were made legally responsible and accountable for the actions of subcontractors on their operations. Furthermore, via Section 23 of the MHSA, the right of black African workers to refuse to enter parts of mines that they deemed unsafe was formally instituted, with South Africa becoming a signatory to the International Labour Organization’s Convention Safety and Health in Mines (176 of 1995) in June 2000 entrenching the right to refuse dangerous work (ILO 2000).
The overall result of these developments was a significant drop in mining fatalities – from 615 fatalities in 1994 to 84 in 2014 (Department of Mineral Resources 2015). While mining employment also declined, the number of deaths dropped proportionately more than employment levels. Concerted institutional efforts at improving OHS continued (see Hermanus et al. 2019). Led by the then Chamber of Mines (now the Minerals Council), for instance, the Mine Occupational Safety and Health Leading Practice and Adoption System (see Stewart and Malatji 2018), debate aside, has been acknowledged as important (see Hermanus, Coulson, and Pillay 2015). While significant improvements in worker OHS have been registered, more nuanced understandings of the factors impacting on OHS are required. The rise in the number of fatal accidents, from a historic low of 73 fatalities in 2016, to 90 fatalities in 2017, before falling back to 81 in 2018, brought an end to a sustained improvement of the decade before (Njini 2017). This unwelcome spike in fatal accidents signals the urgency of tacking the issue despite the hopes that 2019 will become a ‘banner year’ for safety and record the lowest number of fatal accidents ever, if the trend for this year continues (Stoddard 2019). We should also note that these figures generally do not include deaths of illegal miners.
Worker safety in the South African mining industry continues to be plagued by the constant danger of rock falls and rock bursts due to seismic activity. Overall, results regarding safety have been mixed, and significant mining legacy health issues, once workers have left mining employment, remain (see Hermanus et al. 2019). Increasingly, current incidents and accidents relate to underground transport, machinery and materials handling. Regarding worker health, silicosis and tuberculosis are still major contributors to significant morbidity and mortality rates in the industry. Their delayed presentation, after years of working on the mines, has been conceptualised as ‘slow violence’ (Nixon 2011).
That it was the labour movement in the 1980s which renewed the struggle for worker OHS is not disputed in South African labour studies. Within a decade and a half, however, trade-union-driven OHS struggles effectively became institutionalised in the safety structures of the industry (see Stewart and Nite 2017). Under the MHSA, the officially recognised NUM health and safety representatives and full-time health and safety stewards became, nevertheless, the most effective layer of the OHS organisation structures of the industry. The initial adversarial day-to-day relationships between the NUM and mining managements softened. Needless to say and often noted, a former president of South Africa, Kgalema Motlanthe, the current chairman of the African National Congress (ANC), Gwede Mantashe, and the current president of the ANC and South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, all occupied the position of General Secretary of the NUM and were central actors in this process of the maturation of trade unionism in mining – as well as having led the charge of the NUM on worker OHS.
In the context of what has been called a class compromise (Moodie 2010), the sustained bureaucratisation of trade union functions and the attendant political Alliance (see Botiveau 2018), the implementation of the MHSA led to ‘the bureaucratisation of safety’. For safety has increasingly revolved around hierarchical organisational structures, the specialisation of tasks, a complex division of labour regarding health and safety issues, and formalised rules and regulations (Dekker 2014). This trend has accelerated since the explosion of occupational health and safety as an issue in the 1970s, in tandem with an increasingly complex globalised world. Post-apartheid democratic South Africa followed the global trend. The drive towards standardisation, extensive legislation and regulation, shifts to outsourcing and subcontracting, and the proliferation in methods of workforce surveillance have contributed to bureaucratisation and manifested in powerful social effects.
In short, the NUM's health and safety representative system became enmeshed with the OHS structures of the mining industry (Stewart and Nite 2017). Rules and procedures took precedence over the independent voices of worker OHS representatives. Increasingly, union personnel were required to negotiate OHS agreements, sign off highly technical codes of practice and standard operating procedures, and monitor these processes in conjunction with management. The rise of trade union OHS ‘experts’ in turn contributed to the widening of ‘social distance’ between rank-and-file workers and trade union officials, office bearers and organisers.
This account, which sees the formal institutionalisation of worker representation and safety legislation eclipsing the initial worker-based perspective (Ibid.), is, however, incomplete. Concerned primarily with the politics of health and safety, it remains constrained within too narrow a construal of OHS, as have the best-intentioned organisational attempts to improve the safety record in the local mining industry. If scholarly analyses have been inadequate, practical efforts have all lagged behind stated goals. Neither the stress on knowledge, education and training of all ‘stakeholders’, the oft-stated goal of safety audits (Lindsay 1992), nor the ‘zero tolerance’ (Zwetslot et al. 2013) strategy have eliminated unhealthy and unsafe workplaces and working practices. This demands that new avenues be explored regarding OHS.
It is hence to the external contextual factors, which specifically impact on worker safety and health, that the article must now turn.
The rise of subcontracting
Whether construed as non-standard employment (ILO 2016) or as subcontracted labour or as falling under the scourge of precarious work (Scully 2016), over the past two decades a high proportion of mineworkers in post-apartheid South Africa have been employed through intermediaries (Kenny and Bezuidenhout 1999). How to deal with such forms of work remains contested. Sustained initiatives of the ILO in this regard and more broadly, for instance, have been considered as ‘tripartite fantasies’ of big corporations, organised labour and governments represented in collective bargaining (Bernards 2017), its ‘achievements and limitations’ recognised (Hermanus et al. 2019) and its institutional efforts at addressing ‘decent work’ regarded as neither feasible nor desirable under neoliberalism (van der Walt 2019).
On South African mines there are various types of subcontractors, from those who specialise in parts of mining operations, such as shaft sinking and underground construction, to those merely acting as labour brokers (Forrest 2015). These contracting companies range from major formal sector companies to small operators. That they are now major role players in the industry is evidenced by 2016 figures which show that out of a total of 457,668 mineworkers, 139,898 (representing 30% of all employment) were employed through such third-party arrangements. The numbers are particularly high in the coal (53%), iron ore (47%), diamond (42%) and platinum (27%) sectors of the industry (see Table 1).
| Commodity | Establishment employees | Contractors' employees | Total | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| employees | |||||||||
| Male | Female | Male | Female | ||||||
| N | % | N | % | N | % | N | % | N | |
| Precious metals and minerals | 208,639 | 68 | 29,093 | 9 | 65,088 | 21 | 4915 | 2 | 307,735 |
| Gold | 88,136 | 76 | 12,386 | 11 | 15,673 | 13 | 312 | 0 | 116,507 |
| Platinum Group Metals | 111,271 | 65 | 15,019 | 9 | 42,301 | 25 | 3833 | 2 | 172,424 |
| Diamonds | 9232 | 49 | 1688 | 9 | 7114 | 38 | 770 | 4 | 18,804 |
| Ferrous metals | 18,627 | 47 | 4153 | 11 | 14,894 | 38 | 1619 | 4 | 39,293 |
| Chrome | 8394 | 54 | 1923 | 12 | 4613 | 30 | 519 | 3 | 15,449 |
| Iron | 7153 | 43 | 1634 | 10 | 7188 | 43 | 626 | 4 | 16,601 |
| Manganese | 3080 | 43 | 596 | 8 | 3093 | 43 | 474 | 7 | 7243 |
| Non-ferrous metals | 6140 | 42 | 1237 | 8 | 6578 | 45 | 795 | 5 | 14,750 |
| Coal | 29,997 | 39 | 6055 | 8 | 37,915 | 49 | 3261 | 4 | 77,228 |
| Salt | 537 | 73 | 153 | 21 | 46 | 6 | 0 | 0 | 736 |
| Special clays | 195 | 63 | 70 | 23 | 36 | 12 | 8 | 3 | 309 |
| Limestone and lime | 1655 | 60 | 233 | 8 | 794 | 29 | 65 | 2 | 2747 |
| Dimension stone | 1044 | 82 | 82 | 6 | 139 | 11 | 4 | 0 | 1269 |
| Aggregate and sand | 5584 | 74 | 835 | 11 | 1098 | 14 | 61 | 1 | 7578 |
| Brickmaking materials | 180 | 68 | 11 | 4 | 66 | 25 | 8 | 3 | 265 |
| Other minerals | 2608 | 45 | 641 | 11 | 2266 | 39 | 241 | 4 | 5756 |
| Grand total | 275,206 | 60 | 42,563 | 9 | 128,920 | 28 | 10,977 | 2 | 457,666 |
Note: Rows in bold represent subtotals of the figures presented below them in italics.
Source: Department of Mineral Resources (2016).
As in other countries, subcontracted workers typically have less job security, lower wages, and are often subjected to more dangerous work than permanently employed workers. Under production conditions in South African mines, subcontracted workers enter into a working environment in which informal practices – by both managers and workers – undermine the effective application and monitoring of health and safety standards. Such informal practices are deeply rooted in the experiential knowledge and practices of mineworkers, first pointed out by Leger (1985), who identified the ‘tacit knowledge’ mineworkers routinely apply to get their job done. Common throughout the mining industry, these practices have been more broadly construed and dubbed ‘planisa’ – meaning to ‘make a plan’ or ‘improvise’ (Timothy Phakathi 2013). Subcontracting tends to create the space where such informal practices flourish, and in so doing, challenge the full implementation of OHS rules and procedures.
Worker respondents to surveys on NUM's servicing of members and health and safety have, in addition, widely reported that subcontractors do not always have the correct Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). Supervisors and underground work teams, whether full-time or subcontracted workers, collude at times to hide occupational injuries in order not to impact on production bonuses and be subjected to penalties. Workers reported instances in which supervisors sent and paid for injured employees to obtain private medical care, thus circumventing the need to report the injury and circumstances which led to it. This practice is compounded when teams are subcontracted and a much bigger share of a team member's wage is made up of production-related bonuses. Where production bonuses can boost a mineworker's basic wage by an average of 20% to 30%, the motivation for these practices is fairly obvious (Bezuidenhout et al. 2005, 30–35; Bezuidenhout, Bischoff, and Masondo 2010, 97–102; Bezuidenhout et al. 2015, 40, 46, 71–72).
Another related dynamic is the practice by supervisors of playing teams off against one another by exploiting linguistic and ethnic differences between members. Such informal forms of control undermine worker solidarity, and can threaten OHS practices. At this informal level ‘job reservation’ still happens when certain positions are reserved for specific linguistic groups. When a team member insists on following health and safety standards, their ethnicity can be highlighted and manipulated as a reason for their unsuitability for the requirements and unwritten norms and expectations attached to the specific job. The same applies to gender. At times, women are blamed for slowing down teams by their insistence on following procedures (Benya 2009, 2016). Members who raise health and safety issues, such as exercising their right to refuse to do dangerous work, have been victimised or moved to other teams (Bezuidenhout et al. 2015, 79–81).
It was also reported by NUM members interviewed for our health and safety audit, specifically on the platinum mines, that some groups of workers were unfamiliar with health and safety standards. Others continued to employ old-style traditional practices. This is also linked to linguistic characteristics of groups that have traditionally not worked in certain occupations. NUM members further reported that some people take unlawful instructions in order to be promoted (Ibid., 80).
High levels of subcontracting on South African mines have unsettled permanently employed mineworkers. Subcontracted workers are often housed in separate, usually inferior facilities. While these workers are usually subject to non-core mining company regimes, they also work alongside full-time workers in the heart of mining production. Subcontracted workers’ compliance with OHS regulations was not always monitored. Unionisation of subcontracted workers was widely reported as being actively discouraged and hence fell outside trade union monitoring of OHS regulations. The NUM's attempts in the past to simultaneously mobilise these workers and restrict their numbers, while limited, has been more successful on gold mines than in other mining sectors.
The NUM's inability to organise these workers left many subcontracted workers unorganised. The Associated Mining and Construction Union (AMCU) clearly exploited this gap and was able to gain a foothold in many previously NUM-dominated mines. Furthermore, union officials have been known to advance their personal interests by becoming subcontractors themselves or, even more perversely, to recruit for subcontractors, double up as subcontractors or sit on company structures determining contracts for subcontractors. This serves only to reinforce their ‘social distance’ from the workers they are meant to serve.
In this prevailing culture – of informal production practices, an incentive-led bonus system, worker/union official social distance, and the insecurity of full-time mine employees in the face of even less secure subcontracted workers – audits are often seen as punitive, rather than as a tool to improve production and safety standards. Such conditions of structural insecurity and felt vulnerability, for all employees, are not conducive to advancing mine safety and health which would further be threatened in sections of the South African mining industry.
The emergence of illegal mining
Measured in actual fatalities at work underground, illegal mining today presents South African mining with an as yet unresolved challenge. Illegal mining activities largely occur in declining gold mining areas such as Welkom in the Free State and the Mpumalanga town of Barberton. Its emergence is related to the demise of the apartheid system of spatial control over mining towns and the challenge of constructing alternative local forms of governmentality. Earlier forms of spatial control were eroded by changes in mining town geographies, as well as the fragmentation of the mining labour market (Bezuidenhout and Buhlungu 2011, 2015).
The phenomenon of illegal mining in South Africa can be described as an insurgent globalisation from below and is both a profoundly local and global affair. Illegal miners both mine for and process gold underground in abandoned or closed excavations, living and sleeping underground for months at a time. The practice initially started in shafts abandoned by formal companies, but soon morphed into open competition between armed gangs and formal mining firms for control over mining stopes.
Global crime networks are central to sustaining illegal mining. According to the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), illegal mining operates on a five-tier system (Hunter 2019). The first tier consists of the informal and illegal miners, referred to as zama-zamas (isiZulu: those who take their chance). The second tier comprises gangs in cahoots with mine shift managers and security guards who alert miners of police sweeps. This tier on surface links up to the third tier comprising local crime syndicates. The fourth tier provides the local–global link. These are exporters of illegally produced gold or other metals. As early as 2007 the Chamber of Mines, in association with the ISS, identified 17 such syndicates. Finally, the fifth tier consists of international buyers. In 2007, the Chamber of Mines and the ISS identified at least three. From a geographical perspective, illegal mining therefore operates at various interlinked levels and on various scales of operation. Our primary focus here is the local scale, keeping in mind that these activities are linked to global processes through international syndicates.
The sheer scale and significance of illegal mining in South Africa came to public attention in the late 2000s and early 2010s, mainly due to events at the controversial Aurora mine where 20 illegal miners were killed by officials from a private security firm in August 2010. That a former participant of a popular reality television show was involved, and that the mine had been owned by relatives of leading political figures of the highest profile, made for sensational news. A spokesperson for Aurora was quoted in the media at the time:
It is simple … if you go out there and steal gold, should I just go down on my knees and pray? It doesn't work like that. We have to protect our assets … They [the men] had guns and everything … Tell me what more our security could have done? It's not as if our people were lunatics and just went crazy. It's not a right thing that people should come and try and invade our mine and steal our gold by force … How do you manage thugs? (SAPA 2010)
This was not, however, the first such incident. In March 2009, 20 illegal miners were found dead underground at Consort mine in Barberton. In June that year, 91 illegal miners died in an underground fire at a disused section of Harmony's Eland shaft in Welkom. In September 2009, Susan Shabangu, then minister of minerals and energy, was quoted in the media:
In Barberton, Mpumalanga, illegal diggers are now taking over equipment and workplaces. They are openly carrying a huge number of weapons, including AK47s and 9-mm pistols. Intergang fights and shootouts are now a daily occurrence in this area. Confrontations between illegal miners and the police and security personnel are becoming more frequent. In Welkom, booby traps using explosives have been set for the police and security personnel. Illicit mining is also spawning other illegal activities, including child prostitution and child labour. (van der Merwe 2009)
In October 2009 it was reported that deaths of illegal miners had equalled fatalities at work in the legal formal mining sector. In March 2010, the then president Jacob Zuma addressed investor concerns over the matter in London: ‘Government is taking this matter seriously and cases are being investigated.’ Later that year, the killings at Aurora occurred. In November 2010, illegal mining was classified as an ‘organised crime’ in order to facilitate the investigation of illegal mining activities and conviction of those involved. In December 2010, the Hawks, South Africa's special investigative unit which falls under the National Prosecuting Authority, arrested eight people, including two policemen, in simultaneous raids in seven sites in Gauteng, the Free State and North West. Those arrested were allegedly linked to a precious metal syndicate.
The issue led to public debates over who should take responsibility for illegal mining. A spokesperson for Harmony Mines, badly affected by illegal mining, explained:
Illegal miners break through barriers, which then exposes them to safety risks … We have improved access control and are searching miners for food and money when they go underground … [Illegal miners] pay large amounts of money [to recognised miners] for water and food. (SAPA 2009)
We believe these guys only become illegal miners when they die. Where do they take the gold? Who buys it? And, more importantly, where do the so-called illegal miners get these large amounts of money to pay for bribes [for water and food]? Our suspicion is that experienced executives who have been in the industry for a while are working with these miners. (van der Merwe 2009)
‘There are many illegal miners underground and these miners are abusing women who work underground. The NUM is fighting to see that those illegal miners leave.’
‘They are very violent and steal some belongings of the mineworkers.’ (Bezuidenhout, Bischoff, and Masondo 2010, 100–101)
According to NUM members, illegal mining is caused by the lack of employment for young people:
‘The illegal miners do not abide by the safety standards of the workplace. Some of them will be seen walking barefoot underground.’
‘Illegal mining puts the lives of full-time workers under serious risk as the zama-zamas force the full-time workers to carry food for them.’ (Ibid., 101–102)
‘Women are playing a huge role in carrying food for them and some offer prostitution services to these zama-zama boys.’ (Bezuidenhout, Bischoff, and Masondo 2010, 101)
‘Illegal miners earn a lot, about R5 000–00 per day for 3–6 months they will be underground. Izinyoka nyoka (illegal [electricity] connectors – but synonymous in some areas with zama zamas) are there, they carry weapons … guns … and the NUM does nothing about it.’ (Ibid.)
This is clearly a highly abnormal mining situation. It goes well beyond OHS issues defined and circumscribed to an arena internal to the workplace. It clearly even goes beyond the attempt to understand the impact of immediate external social issues affecting OHS, such as HIV/AIDS, subcontracting or inter-union rivalry.
The phenomenon of illegal mining begs the question whether the very notion of ‘occupational health and safety’ is an appropriate conceptual lens under conditions of illegal mining. These struggles underground implicate and affect formal sector mining and all of its personnel, perhaps even more than they do the illegal miners themselves. This gives a radically new meaning to occupational health and safety. How, for instance, does a trade union respond when union members charge their union for not doing enough about illegal mining?
The impact of trade union rivalry on health and safety
The massacre of 34 mineworkers at Marikana by the South African police on 16 August 2012, preceded by violence and murder at the Lonmin mine, shook South African society to the core and seriously challenged the post-apartheid mining order. An article in this journal has asserted that Marikana is a ‘turning point in South African history’ (Alexander 2013). The fear of death and the underlying issue of safety, being pushed to work in unsafe areas and workers’ safety being ignored, feature prominently in workers’ testimonies regarding the background to the strike (see Alexander et al. 2012, 8).
It is further no exaggeration to state that the Marikana massacre directly contributed to the split in COSATU, when the largest of COSATU's affiliates, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, together with other unions, formed the Federation of South African Trade Unions (SAFTU) in opposition to COSATU. SAFTU joined with social movements beyond the labour movement to challenge the hegemony of the political alliance comprising COSATU, the ANC and the South African Communist Party. A further result was the exodus from the NUM of a significant cohort of especially platinum mineworkers. Virtually en masse, workers joined AMCU, which was formed on the coal mines in 2001, and which was shortly thereafter to lead the longest strike in the history of South African labour (Chinguno 2015; Mathekga 2015).
Led by a charismatic former NUM shop steward, Joseph Mathunjwa (Sinwell 2015), AMCU very seriously eroded, if not very largely replaced, the NUM on the platinum mines. With the rise of AMCU on the platinum mines and in some of the gold mines, particularly in Carletonville, NUM lost around 100,000 members in a year.
Unsurprisingly, interviews revealed considerable rivalry between the NUM and AMCU. Faced with discontinuity in representation of members by elected health and safety representatives, companies had, it was reported, rolled back health and safety gains made by the NUM over the previous three decades. The issue of workers forced into early retirement, due to alleged medical incapacity, was repeatedly reported by NUM members on the platinum mines which reported the highest job losses due to medical reasons (Bezuidenhout et al. 2015, 81). Historically, the NUM was good at representing members in this regard. It does seem, however, that a number of mining companies moved fairly rapidly to exploit the vacuum in the OHS system to retire older members early. Such ‘hidden retrenchments’ appear to have been exacerbated by the inexperience of the new union. NUM members who were declared fit were later declared incapacitated or ill on applying for other jobs.
On the other hand, AMCU moved swiftly to increase worker representation to enhance trade union oversight of worker health and safety and representation (see Stewart and Nite 2017; Botiveau 2018).
Inter-union rivalry impacts on OHS organisational structures in other ways. At one mine in Limpopo its intensity resulted in the politicisation of the issuing of PPE, with OHS representatives disadvantaging members from a rival union as a form of retribution. Where inter-union rivalry tensions were high, for instance, only two-thirds of NUM members on platinum mines and just over half of NUM members in coal mines and other sectors would approach a worker-elected (though management-appointed) health and safety representative of a rival union (Bezuidenhout et al. 2015, 111). When probed in this regard, different platinum and coal mineworkers either said: ‘[No]. NUM and AMCU do not co-operate with each other and [do] compete for members’ or ‘[No], he is the member of the other union (AMCU)’ or ‘I will not do it because it is not right as I am under the NUM membership.’
Needless to say, such attitudes, sentiments and practices expressed by trade union members of rival trade unions, explicitly relating to OHS matters, seriously impact on advancing health and safety in mines.
Conclusion
The conventional workplace and employee relations focus of occupational safety and health is both conceptually and practically limited. In the South African mining industry, mine health and safety are central to any meaningful politics which claims to take the safety of workers and the ‘slow violence’ to their health seriously. The significance of the deficits in mineworker safety and health cannot be fully grasped without an appreciation of how OHS is negatively influenced by factors external to its operation in the workplace and to employee relations.
This article built on, but has broadened, the narrow construal of recent analysis that the incorporation of workers’ unions into the hard-won modern legislative OHS system led to the ‘bureaucratisation of safety’ and the simultaneous loss of worker voices in the issues of safety which directly concern them. This can be viewed as a further instance of what Buhlungu (2010) has called the post-democratic ‘paradox of victory’. Worker safety and health, it might even be said, suffered a further ‘paradox of victory’ before the political victory over apartheid: as OHS systems ‘matured’ and became institutionalised, the initial worker-oriented perspective was eclipsed by a mining company-led and managed professionalisation, systematisation and procedural bureaucratisation of mineworker safety and health.
What has not been sufficiently recognised is how the worker representation and safety legislation architecture, set up by a radically reformed labour regime after democracy in 1994, came under additional strain through the rise of external factors: subcontracting and the emergence of illegal mining before Marikana and the union rivalry following the rise of AMCU after Marikana.
It is in this context that empirical evidence showed the relevance of these factors. Though not quantified, workers reported how a range of such issues threatened their safety and health at work and beyond it. Mining companies, to recall, demonstrably rolled back gains previously won by mining unions, while trade union representatives turned OHS issues (such as the provision of health and safety equipment) into a bargaining tool for attracting new members.
While requiring further investigation, the external factors remain obscured when viewed from within the OHS domain as conventionally construed. For many workers, as well as from an OHS perspective, it does not appear they are being sufficiently proactively addressed. This is not to deny, but rather to acknowledge, increased complexity regarding both OHS and these issues.
Their persistence, however, is at least in part also due to the OHS management system being an operationally closed, self-organising and self-referential (autopoietic) system. Yet autopoietic systems are also communicatively open to and able to ‘resonate’ with their broader environment – as the mine OHS system did when it underwent a radical modernised transformation due to unionisation in the 1980s. Being a self-organising, autopoietic system, the OHS system currently has not (yet) responded to or ‘resonated’ with the ‘noise’ of its external social and political environment. Simply put, there is insufficient external pressure on the OHS system to respond to its environment. The required ‘noise’ is not loud enough.
It is here where the political implications of this analysis for workers and trade unions reveal themselves. Were the negative impacts of the external factors discussed in this article to be taken up decisively in a conceptually broadened view of occupational safety and health, sufficient social ‘noise’ would potentially enable the OHS system to assume its previously central role in worker mobilisation and compel an institutional ‘resonance’ with the social and political environment within which it is embedded.
Worker informants across a range of research projects clearly expressed disquiet and dissatisfaction regarding a number of OHS issues, as well as pointing, whether implicitly or explicitly, to the external environmental factors that negatively impinged on their safety and health. In their terms the issues included the self-interested behaviour of some of their own erstwhile health and safety officials, as well as a macabre incarnation of proletarian armed struggle in mining production underground between full-time employed and subcontracted workers on the one hand and desperate zama-zama miners on the other.
Whether conceived as internal or external to the workplace, understanding and addressing worker safety and health issues must not only be conceptually broadened, but deepened by way of revisiting the organisational structure of the OHS system and its forms of worker representation. With OHS arguably being of considerably broader political import than previously conceptualised, scholars committed to a progressive analysis can no longer run the risk of viewing worker safety and health as a mere ‘technical’, ‘employee relations’ matter, unworthy of close critical attention.
Precarious subcontracted work, illegal mining and the divisive scourge of inter-union rivalry are currently serious threats to life and limb that some mineworkers must face in addition to their harsh conditions of underground mining. The venerable tradition of occupational safety and health simply must be seen as needing to assume new conceptual, practical and political dimensions. Such is the preliminary endpoint of a focus on issues external to the immediate workplace generally excluded from conventional occupational safety and health discourse. This has implications for worker politics and progressive research practice applicable elsewhere.