Introduction
A report entitled: ‘Towards safer underground mining: an investigation commissioned by the National Union of Mineworkers’ (Leger 1985) proved an important resource to a young National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), its initial mobilising campaign around worker safety and its rapid and successful growth. Jean-Patrick Leger’s larger work, entitled ‘Talking rocks: an investigation into the pit sense of black mineworkers’ (1992), remains the foundational worker-oriented study on safety in the South African mining industry. This work positively identified ‘tacit knowledge’ as key to how poorly educated, disenfranchised and racially oppressed black migrant mineworkers coped and survived at work in harsh conditions in the deepest mines on the planet while living in rudimentary, single-sex mine hostel compounds. The findings proved to be central for the NUM in presenting the case for the recognition of mineworkers’ ‘tacit knowledge’ and skills, not least to address the industry’s injury and fatality prone safety record.
Set very briefly in its broader historical context, the article first outlines and confirms insights from Leger’s identification of ‘tacit knowledge’ by citing coal and gold mineworkers’ autobiographical accounts (See Nite and Stewart 2012).1 With the rubric of ‘tacit knowledge’ as central, though broadened to include mineworkers’ tacit and practical, experientially based sense, and skills and mining ‘wisdom’, these accounts enabled this first tentative periodisation of occupational health and safety in the large South African gold and coal mines over 60 years.2
There is a stark contrast between the beginning and end of the 60 years under review. The racially despotic circumstances prevailing under apartheid gave way to an improvement in the safety climate underground with the advent of unionisation and worker safety spearheaded by the NUM. Under democracy, with the NUM again in the forefront, a modern worker health and safety legislation and worker representation regime, framed by consultative tripartite institutions, was instituted.
The article then notes the trajectory and organisational consequences of institutionalising worker safety representation following the Mine Health and Safety Act (MHSA) no. 29 of 1996. This provided the legal basis for the health and safety (H&S) representatives and committees previously negotiated beyond statutory legislation in the mining industry and more broadly (see Lichtenstein 2013; Allen 2003). Occurring within a broader political project of ‘negotiated transformation’ (Botiveau 2014a) under democracy, the industry’s safety regime was overhauled and the NUM’s organisational safety structures consolidated. The NUM’s initial worker-oriented focus, however, was eclipsed as safety became a collaborative effort between mining capital and organised labour under the aegis of the democratic state. It can only be noted that recent indications are that safety is increasingly individualised and personalised as key changes occur in the organisation of work underground – guided by a major industry initiative motivated by a behaviourist construal of ‘web of tacit beliefs’ at their core.
The article then notes current developments around mine safety: state implementation of safety legislation, research on the right to refuse dangerous work commissioned by the Mine Health and Safety Council (MHSC) and the negative impact of inter-union rivalry on safety.
A conclusion draws together a number of the key points made in the article. It goes beyond the evidence cited to suggest the emergence of the individualisation and ‘responsibilisation’ of safety (Gray 2009). Finally, two graphs detail casualties across the mining sector in South Africa from 1970 to 2013 and an international comparison of fatality rates from 2003 to 2014. Mindful of difficulties reporting injury and fatality rates (Eisner and Leger 1988, 1), what seems clear is that South African mines have become safer over time.
Workers’ ‘tacit knowledge’ and safety
From the inception of gold mining in 1886 and coal mining from 1895, until the mid 1960s, South African mining was characterised by violence (Alexander 2008; Moodie 2005, 1994; Breckenridge 1998) and continues to be marked by disability, fatalities (MHSC 2004a; MHSI 2004; Leger and Arkles 1989; Eisner and Leger 1988) and occupational disease (McCulloch 2013; Roberts 2009; Katz 1994; Packard 1989; Burke and Richardson 1978). The Mines and Works Act of 1911 (as amended) regarded black mineworkers as unskilled, likely to run risks and hence required white supervisory personnel to ensure productivity and safe mining. Black mineworkers were excluded from the Industrial Conciliation Acts of 1924 and 1956, which reserved skilled jobs for white workers (referred to as miners) and did not define black workers as ‘employees’ who were subject to criminal sanction under migrant labour contracts and ‘masters and servants’ legislation (Duncan 1995).
After the African mineworkers’ strike in 1946, through to the early 1970s, there is a gap in South African mining labour history. Studies on ‘faction fights’ (Moodie 1992; McNamara 1985; Horner and Kooy 1980), the expansion and consolidation of South Africa’s migrant labour empire (Crush, Jeeves, and Yudelman 1991) and the intensification of labour and gains in productivity (Allen 2002) mark this period. There is next to nothing on black mineworkers’ experience at work underground. Many experienced black mineworkers had, however, developed a range of skills to ensure their survival underground. Mine management began to recognise these skills from the mid 1960s (Allen 2002, 277–281; Crush, Jeeves, and Yudelman 1991, 85–93), a period which coincides with the end of the ‘maximum average system’ when incentives replaced systematic and institutionalised violence in production (Moodie 2005; 2015). In the context of a skills shortage and the ending of a ‘low-wage, low productivity system’ in secondary industry (Feinstein (2005, 128), black mineworkers increasingly became seen as ‘groups with different skills and informal status’ (Allen 2002, 281). These skills had the potential to increase productivity, but their contribution to safety received little attention.
Working primarily as ostensibly unskilled or semi-unskilled labour in a racialised society, mineworkers faced occupational discrimination at work. Defying instructions, reporting unsafe conditions or retaliating by assaulting a supervisor were grounds for instant dismissal. When accidents occurred, individual workers would be blamed – an abiding theme of ‘blaming the victim’, to which the historical and safety literature attests (Nite 2013; Mills 2010; Rogers 2009; Leger 1992). Industrial accidents have consequently widely been seen as the result of misadventure, mistakes or individual negligence by production workers.
With the rubric of ‘tacit knowledge’ at its core, the NUM-commissioned safety research covered virtually all aspects of mining work (Leger 1985). The research showed how mineworkers had learned to protect themselves underground and conclusively demonstrated that especially black mineworkers, but also white supervisors, had acquired a body of ‘tacit knowledge’, expressed in a range of practical skills which were not readily explicable, akin to and consonant with the pit sense of Cornish tin miners and Welsh colliers (Leger 1992; Webster and Leger 1992).
Crucially, Leger’s work convincingly challenged the prejudice of ‘blaming the victim’ of industrial and mining accidents. Mineworkers believed that accidents could be prevented, but were ‘refused permission’ to make work safe (Leger 1985, 18–19). Leger documented how gold mineworkers’ ‘tacit knowledge’ applied particularly to identifying precursors to rockfalls. Mineworkers interpreted the significance of creaking rocks, dust and small stones falling and widening cracks in rock faces. By virtue of spending more time at the rock face than white miners – who were ‘no longer needed for close supervision’ (Moodie 1994, 72) – black mineworkers, team leaders in particular, monopolised key aspects of practical mining knowledge. It took white supervisors far longer than black mineworkers to acquire this knowledge, and they were ‘embarrassed’ to learn their pit sense – or practical mining sense and ‘wisdom’ – from black workers (Leger 1992, 283). Phillimon Mamohjela Motswere (Mineworker biography no. 1)3 and Makathini Khontswayo (Mineworker biography no. 2), indeed, boasted that they taught new white recruits (See Nite and Stewart 2012; Webster and Leger 1992).
While mineworkers were formally trained in safety, the bulk of their informal ‘tacit knowledge’ and skills was orally transmitted and gained on the job. Leger argued that recognition of workers’ ‘tacit knowledge’ would contribute significantly to safer mining, despite its exercise resulting in ‘antagonistic co-operation’ underground (1992, 292–326). Contestation over knowledge and skill challenged traditional managerial prerogatives and mine employers’ legal obligation for mine and worker safety. Having identified workers’ ‘tacit knowledge’, Leger’s work on safety for the NUM highlighted workers’ personal experiences of accidents, revealed dysfunctional aspects of the racialised organisation of work underground and challenged conventional wisdom that individual workers were responsible for accidents. Instead, ‘pressure for greater production was an important cause of accidents’ (Leger 1985, v). This work tackled the lack of training of team leaders, revealed incentive bonuses as the ‘hidden supervisors of production’ and exposed the lack of statutory rights to refuse work deemed dangerous or to participate in inquiries and safety inspections. Moreover, the lack of representative safety committees, the inadequacy of personal protective equipment and limited training were detailed. Leger justified his worker-oriented approach based on ‘black workers’ perceptions of safety’ in terms of their ‘unique knowledge and experience’ of some of the ‘toughest working conditions in the world’ (1985, 2).
The acquisition of workers’ knowledge and skills was also, however, learned in mineworkers’ communities. Older mineworkers passed on their knowledge and experience. For colliery workers, John Masilela (Mineworker biography no. 3) and Sechaba Matiase (Mineworker biography no. 4), their fathers and other relatives warned them to be watchful of ‘the roof’, the sides of haulages and tunnels and moving winch ropes in the gullies and travelling ways. Younger workers were also warned of gases and heat in the skwere (the working face). A younger London Mkhomqo (Mineworker biography no. 5), echoed similar sentiments (Nite and Stewart 2012).
In short, workers ‘tacit knowledge’, pit sense or mining sense, has long been crucial to mining. It was not pre-given or fixed, as might be inferred from Leger’s work, but developed over time. This generally occluded knowledge played an important part in workers’ attitudes to and defensive role in working safely. More so than reflected in Leger’s work, workers’ mining sense lay at the basis of their assertion of self and confidence, and resulted in team leaders’ acts of resistance and pride in successfully protecting their work teams from harm. Such acts signalled resistance to racialised oppression which occurred especially prior to unionisation in the early 1980s.
Fatalism: resistance and refusal, mid 1950s to early 1980s
In the late 1950s, Alfred Jozine (Mineworker biography no. 6), a rock driller, refused to work and came to blows with his white supervisor to get his point across. Awareness of conditions of ‘the table’ (the ‘hanging wall’ in gold mining or the ‘roof’ in collieries) and the lack of adequate mine support materials, which prevents workers from adhering to mine standards and thus working safely (Stewart 2012; Stewart, Dart, and Jennings 2004; Phakathi 2011; Webster et al. 1999), was a major anxiety for his generation onwards.
With unease about methane gas and coal dust also being noted, Makathini Khontswayo, a timber man (responsible for mine timber support structures) and team leader, recalls how in the 1960s management blamed workers for causing hazards and he explicitly lamented the lack of worker rights. Without legal authority, he removed his gang in the absence of adequate ventilation and where there were unsupported working faces. His gang refused to enter faces they thought were dangerous. Phillimon Motswere recounted how ‘you need to be careful and check everywhere in order to be safe,’ while Khontswayo explained that: ‘You are a team leader. You make sure you have checked everything. If there is something wrong, make sure you report it quickly to the shift boss. I just worked and kept the rules of the mine.’ Significantly, Khontswayo combined mining sense and procedural compliance and applauded senior managers and government inspectors who had a no-nonsense attitude to safety.
Important here is that both team leaders claimed never to have had any fatalities in their gangs. As Khontswayo said proudly: ‘I never allowed killing of anyone in that mine while I was still working at the deep level. I worked for 27 years at the deep levels.’ This is no small claim and achievement. These accounts resonate with those of Leger (1985, 1986, 1992). The gangers in Khontswayo’s team, significantly, took the lead in requiring him to report to higher authorities about workplace hazards.
As white supervisors and miners were responsible for safety, but also for achieving production targets, they often encouraged (Leger 1986, 600) and even compelled workers to take risks. Jozine was emphatic: ‘The white men used to force workers even when they saw that the place was not OK for drilling, but they used to move away,’ a practice recounted by Leger (1992, 321) and witnessed by an author 40 years later.
The early 1970s signalled a rupture on the South African mines. The ore yield began to decline (Jones and Inggs 1994, 9). Namibian contract mineworkers struck in 1971, breaking the quiescence of the 1960s. The ‘mine wages explosion’ occurred the same year and into the next (Moodie 2009, 47; Allen 2002). Violent compound confrontations lasting 32 months left 172 men dead (Wilson 1976, 15). The withdrawal of 120,000 Malawian mineworkers in 1974 shocked the Chamber of Mines. With the dramatic rise in mine wages some mechanisation occurred in the stopes (Wilson 1972). FRELIMO, the Mozambique Liberation Front, came to power in Mozambique and alarmed both the Chamber and the South African state (Horner and Kooy 1980) while militant black South African youth mobilised as unemployment rose and the mines made a permanent labour cut of 10%. In 1977 the productive ‘backbone’ of the mining industry fractured when only 35,000 of the Mozambican army of 97,000 mineworkers (Crush and James 1995, 18) reported for duty. The numbers of experienced non-South African migrant mineworkers fell off as largely untested and untried, yet fully proletarianised, South African workers came to the mines. Some had experience of trade unionism and were ‘certainly less tolerant of mining conditions’ (McNamara 1985, 246).
Well into the 1970s, Sechaba Matiase, who migrated from asbestos to gold and coal mines, confirmed that ‘things were bad then.’ Another anecdotal source notes: ‘There were no safety measures, no masks. We were only taught to be careful of rockfalls, not dust. They would beat up people with fists’ but ‘I fought back’ (Ledwaba and Sadiki 2016, 29).
Whether dressing cases (minor injuries), ‘lost time’ incidents (serious injuries – being absent from work for 14 days or more) or fatalities, accidents characterised mineworkers’ lives underground. As Phillimon Motswere asserted: ‘Management blamed the person who was injured’ and ‘thought we were stupid if we injured ourselves’, but noted that workers ‘also wanted to protect themselves’.
With a ‘human resource policy’ mooted only in 1978 to focus on black worker productivity (Hocking 1997, 260), a mining engineer and production manager, Olaf Iversen (Mineworker biography no. 7), recalls that ‘The DME [Department of Minerals and Energy] was not too interested. I would say before 1980 production was much more important than safety absolutely. There is no debate about that. I mean things were designed that way.’ It was certainly assumed by ‘certain managers’ in the ‘old days’ that ‘safety and productivity were not compatible,’ yet by the early 1980s it is unlikely on Iversen’s evidence that this view was ‘long gone’ (Hocking 1997, 308).
During these years and into the future accidents were often fatalistically accepted as inevitable. As Moses Xaba (Mineworker biography no. 8) expressed it, ‘even my luck will run out’. Recalling rockfalls, Khontswayo was stoical: ‘About three times I slept buried under the stones.’
Mass action: unionisation and negotiating safety, early 1980s to mid 1990s
With a soaring price of gold, profits having increased from R4 a ton in 1970 to R85 a ton in 1980 (Feinstein 2005, 208) and the introduction of faster hydraulic drills at the rock face, increased labour productivity became the watchword in this period (Feinstein 2005, 206ff). With the migrant labour ‘recruiting network’ now ‘a shell’ (Crush, Jeeves, and Yudelman 1991, 165), mineworkers began to ‘shoot straight’ (James 1992, 69–70), which means workers would no longer rely on the recruiting system and would ‘sign on at the gates of the mine’ (Davies and Head 1995, 442). With the state finally eliminating job reservation, the first black mineworkers took on apprenticeships. This marks the shift ‘from fatalism to mass action’ (Leger 1988) as disenfranchised mineworkers became industrial citizens and unionised mobilisation won them safety representation.
John Masilela, for instance, was clear that changes coincided with the arrival of the NUM in 1982. For its part, beyond the mines, the apartheid state’s Machinery and Occupational Safety Act (MOSA) was a ‘counter-challenge to trade union health and safety activity’ as its provisions only ‘promoted state and management involvement in health and safety’ (Myers and Steinberg 1984, 147). The intention of MOSA was to remove health and safety issues from the mass-based trade unions of black workers to safety committees (Haysom 1984', 121). While the state and secondary industry responded conservatively to ‘labour’s thrusts’ on the health and safety front (Leger, Maller, and Myers 1986, 79), the NUM bumped up against a racialised Mines and Works Act.
Yet the ending of one old practice suggests that attitudes to black labour were changing, as it was ‘from 1984’ – the year of the first ever legal strike by black mineworkers (Leger and van Niekerk 1986, 68) – ‘when the graveyards in the mines were closed’. Previously, if ‘someone died they would bury him there. At home the family members assumed that the guy forgot home and was not visiting’ (Nite and Stewart 2012). Leger meanwhile reported that almost 90% of team leaders and almost 80% of rock drill operators said they had refused to work in dangerous conditions (1986, 598).
By 1985, when economic ‘conditions deteriorated’ after the high point in the gold price of 1980 (see Feinstein 2005, 208ff), the NUM was ‘attacking the industry’s safety record’ (Hocking 1997, 313). But it would take 177 fatalities in the Kinross gold mine disaster on 16 September 1986 and between 250,000 and 325,000 mineworkers on a work stoppage on 1 October, mobilised around the slogan of ‘organise or die’, to nudge change forward. Yet, ‘calls to radically improve safety standards met with a lukewarm response and boastful safety claims’ (Baskin 1991, 149), with the Chamber refusing to negotiate over health and safety outside the venerable 1914 Prevention of Accidents Committee (Leger, Maller, and Myers 1986, 81).
The regularity of racially inspired incidents and physical violence underground appears to have improved, despite the ‘old system’ of racism and an increase in dismissals recurring after the 1987 mineworkers strike (Baskin 1991, 236). Attitudes of ‘blaming the victim’ for accidents, however, were slower to change. What did not change, through to today, was how production pressure, as Leger pointed out (1992), continued to predominate underground, despite the decision in 1988 that safety would ‘top the agenda’ at all South African Institute of Mine Managers’ (SAIMM) gatherings (Hocking 1997, 308). Research published in this year failed to find any correlation between the star award rating system of the International Safety Rating (ISR) system, adopted by the Chamber of Mines in 1978, and fatality or reportable injury rates (Eisner and Leger 1988). Worse, ‘the greatest danger’ of the ISR scheme, the researchers argued, was ‘the degree of complacency it appears to have engendered in some of its adherents’ (Eisner and Leger 1988b, 158).
Especially when production pressure dominates, safety is invariably neglected. A white miner, Anton Vosloo (Mineworker biography no. 9), had two mineworkers killed on his watch:
[When] I was a young miner I lost two people in a development end [the rock face of a haulage tunnel]. It was in 1992. I was very upset. I went in and took him [sic] out with my own hands. After that I had a complete mind-set change because you learn from your mistakes. Then your mind changes drastically from production to safety.
By 1990 the NUM had established a health and safety department, employed regional safety organisers, had won the right to have ‘safety stewards and safety committees in the workplace’ (Baskin 1991, 153) and had signed a number of agreements around H&S (Allen 2003). It would, however, take legislation and the establishment of a modern representational system under democracy to significantly reduce direct contests between men underground, such as fights and arguments, over safety.
Incorporation: safety legislation and structural change, mid 1990s to the present
With the demise of apartheid and the advent of democracy, it was largely trade union pressure which resulted in safety legislation in South Africa (Hermanus 1999). Following the recommendations of the Report of the Commission of Inquiry into safety and health in the mining industry (Leon Commission) in 1993–95, repeatedly demanded by the NUM since 1983 (Leger 1992, viii), the Mine Health and Safety Act (MHSA) no. 29 of 1996 ushered in a modern, wide-ranging legal H&S framework. The Act reflected ‘an outcomes approach to regulation, based on risk assessment and risk management’ (Hermanus, Coulson, and Pillay 2015, 717) with government, employers and organised labour represented in the Mine, Health and Safety Inspectorate (MHSI). In addition, tripartite engagement was formalised in the MHSC – ‘a national structure established by the MHSA that considers the state of health and safety in the sector, proposes policy and legislation, commissions research and provides advice to the Minister of Mineral Resources’ (Hermanus, Coulson, and Pillay 2015, 717). The provision for the election of H&S representatives, the establishment of H&S committees and full-time, paid H&S representatives, is a central aspect of the Act.
The MHSA did not take immediate effect, though ongoing research suggests the MHSI did initiate a drive towards safer mining after its passing. For Olaf Iversen, on the gold mines:
Safety was not really marked until 2004. I mean that’s the first time the Inspectorate really started saying to us on the mines: ‘Guys! Your safety record is not really what it should be.’ And that is when they started tightening up, in about 2002.
Certainly, since the early 2000s, safety talk has become something of a mantra on the mines. Later in the decade, for Juliet Mkhabela (Mineworker biography no. 11), a matriculated school leaver and Level Control Assistant, ‘It is a case of: Safety! Safety! We speak about and eat safety during lunch on the mine.’ She thinks it’s time to address racism. Yet Solidarity – formerly the exclusively white, male mine workers’ union – only formally established its Health and Safety Department in 2007 (Personal communication, Paul Mardon, 14 November 2013). In the same year the Chamber of Mines initiated the Mine Occupational Safety and Health Leading Practice Adoption System (MOSH) to improve health and safety on the mines (see Hermanus, Coulson, and Pillay 2015). Half a decade later, Simphiwe Litchfield (Mineworker biography no. 12), from a coal mining family, an NUM shaft steward and junior manager, would speak on behalf of the mining company for which she worked:
We have a number of protective schemes in place. They cannot go underground drunk, after taking flu medication, without permission to drive a machine. They should know how to use a rescue pack. We see that they cannot go underground without their PPE [personal protective equipment] which includes equipment for the ears, eyes, a dust mask and overalls.
Both Mkhabela and Litchfield are, however, disengaged from work underground, are separated from fellow trade union members underground by age and gender, represent an emerging better-off mine employee (See Beresford 2012), and articulate current managerial safety discourse. Mkhabela said:
I never worked underground [so] find myself arguing with the old uneducated people [who] are stubborn. When I tell them something they reply to me: ‘I started working at the mine before you were born. We are making the money, not you sitting in the offices with tea.’ They expect us to let them do what they want and not as per company rules and regulations.
Two years before these informants expressed themselves, the 2010 tripartite Mine Health and Safety Summit ‘launched a framework that included guiding principles, commitment and action points, to shift health and safety culture, referred to in the sector as the Culture Transformation Framework’ (Hermanus, Coulson, and Pillay 2015, 718). By this time an independent assessment of MOSH noted that this major initiative was established across the mining sector, with ‘mining companies, labour representatives, and the MHSI [seeing] the programme as significant’ (see Hermanus, Coulson, and Pillay 2015). Organised labour, however, while acknowledging the significance of MOSH at particular sites, considered its impact on the sector as a whole as ‘negligible’ (Hermanus, Coulson, and Pillay 2015, 723). Despite the commitment of MOSH to worker involvement, workers and other ‘role players’ were found to feel ‘marginalised’ by the MOSH process (Ibid., 722).
The institutionalisation of worker representation and safety legislation
Under current safety legislation, the MHSA requires complex technical codes of practice, regarding all aspects of H&S, to be undertaken in consultation with registered trade unions and workers’ representatives. Workers are required to elect their H&S representative – one for every 20 workers – who receive training after which mining companies ratify their election. Despite the paucity of academic safety research in mining, it seems clear that with the institutionalisation of safety and the introduction of participatory processes, there appears to have been a shift away from a worker-based perspective supported by insights into workers’ ‘tacit knowledge’.
Part of the reason for this lies in the broader political context within which representation around worker safety has taken place. Central here is the alliance between the ruling African National Congress (ANC), the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) in which the NUM was then its largest affiliate. Without further argument, the ‘professionalisation’ of the NUM’s (Botiveau 2014b) officials, shaft and safety stewards occurred not only alongside the union’s growth, but also within the narrative of class compromise (Moodie 2010), Trade unionists were initiated into this politics. The success of the NUM, post-apartheid, resulted in significant upward social mobility for its shop stewards and officials, and contributed to the union becoming distanced from parts of its rank and file. Many former activists were drawn into positions in industry or deployed to the new democratic state (Bischoff 2015; Southall 2015; Beresford 2012; Phakathi 2011; Buhlungu 2010). Resulting from ‘bipartite and tripartite’ institutional dialogue, moreover, social relations between NUM officials and industry managers have, evidence suggests, become uncharacteristically close (Botiveau 2014a, 630–633). Despite the absence of detail, the NUM full-time H&S representatives would have certainly been influenced by these developments. The upshot was that over time, with worker safety representation institutionalised in the regular running of mines, the union’s focus was gradually and subtly diverted from its underground worker constituency.
The full-time safety representatives need to be the focus of dedicated scholarly research. Being full-time and paid by the mining companies, like shaft stewards, they have the full run of a mine. The position has long been a sought within the ranks of the NUM. A full-time H&S rep earns a higher salary than workers and enjoys perks such as cell phones and access to facilities and offices, the latter required by the Act. At the level of the rank and file, however, only recently has the large number of elected H&S representatives underground started to receive dedicated academic attention (See Coulson 2016). Once elected, the H&S representatives are trained and become central to workers’ complaints, fulfil a wide range of functions at the epicentre of how to mine safely, and face considerable pressure from workers to whom they are answerable (Coulson 2016). It is these H&S representatives who feel the pressures of production when workers, driven by the bonus system, ‘just want to work’, including ‘when there’s no material’ and workers ‘end up working in the wrong way trying by all means to put things together’ (Coulson 2016, 2) – by engaging, in other words, in planisa (improvisation) in dysfunctional ways which compromise safety (see |Phakathi 2011; 2013).
Strengthening ‘Section 23’: the right of refusal to do dangerous work
Research commissioned by the tripartite MHSC into Section 23 (The Right to Leave a Dangerous Working Place) of the MHSA shows that the exercise of this critically important right has taken root. Workers currently widely exercise ‘Section 23', which has been actively promoted and is well established across gold, platinum and especially coal mines (Stewart 2013). However, 16% of workers continued to say they did not have the right to refuse dangerous work (Stewart 2013). Section 23 – alongside Section 22, which explicitly requires all workers to promote their own health and safety and that of their colleagues – is nevertheless the central aspect of the current safety legislation. No longer do mineworkers need to act outside the law or challenge the organisational hierarchy in the mine when they consider a working environment to be dangerous. Instead, one senior mine manager in a large mining group issued mine employees with a card which explicitly demanded that every individual demand the rights enshrined in Section 23.
The MHSC research resulted in guidelines for the compilation of a mandatory code of practice (MHSC 2016). Appended to the MHSA, the guidelines require the industry and organised labour to negotiate specific procedures when workers exercise the right to leave or refuse work in conditions they deem dangerous. With this being a right the individual can claim (since 1 July 2016) that this potentially places even greater, if not the primary, responsibility for safety on the individual worker. One Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) trade unionist, for instance, expressed a concern regarding the guidelines and whether or not a supervisor could override a decision by workers exercising the right of refusal. Although as yet untested and untried, it appears that a worker might now, deeply ironically, be in breach of the law if it is found during accident investigation they did not remove themselves from a dangerous workplace. The reasons for not doing so are the whip of production, peer or supervisory pressure and contested assessments of the risk or danger.
Implementing Section 54 of the MHSA: halting production
A further development is the direct role of the state in implementing safety legislation by way of the MHSI of the Department of Mineral Resources (DMR). Section 54 of the MHSA empowers any inspector to issue instructions to halt work. In the context of an increase in fatalities at mines in 2016, ‘Section 54’ work stoppages came under the spotlight (The Star, Business Report, 24 August 2016) and again in the Chamber of Mines’ public comment on the 2017 national budget. With chief executives of major mining companies having complained about the impact of stoppages, the Mineral Resources minister defended the decisive use by the MHSI of Section 54 notices to enforce safety legislation. This has been an acutely sensitive issue. Research commissioned and submitted to the MHSC (Hermanus et al. 2013/14) in this regard has not yet been released for public consumption.
Over the past decade where there has been a fatal accident the MHSI has routinely closed underground sections or even the whole mine. In 2011 Olaf Iversen did not think this a sound strategy for improving safety. He turned out to have company, with many mining company managers, trade unionists and even workers believing that the MHSI was unduly harsh in implementing the relevant sections of the Act (Stewart 2013). Tshepo Zondi (Mineworker biography no. 14) was critical of government who ‘should not only come [to the mine] when there is an accident’. Workers were among the bitter complainants when a mine manager of a gold mine voluntarily closed a section he assessed too hazardous to work in safely for two weeks – as this meant a loss of their production bonuses.
In short, while half a century ago individual team leaders had to hazard embarking on technically illegal action in the interests of their own and other workers’ safety, the state has since the early 2000s stopped work in terms of the MHSA. What remains to be established is whether mineworkers consider their views, knowledge and skills to be a factor in the current complex scenario regarding mine and worker safety, safety stoppages in particular.
Inter-union rivalry: consequences for health and safety
Since the death of 34 platinum mineworkers at the hands of the police at Marikana (Alexander et al. 2013; Frankel 2013) in 2012, there has been a major realignment of trade union membership on the mines. It can only be noted that this has had consequences for worker health and safety, as reported elsewhere (Bezuidenhout, Bischoff, and Stewart 2016). It might further be noted that the NUM has shed nearly a third of its membership to the rival AMCU. Needing to offer its expectant and fractious members something new, in early 2015 an AMCU organiser told an author of the union’s demand for not only one full-time health and safety representative per shaft as previously negotiated by the NUM, but a fully paid health and safety committee. Since June 2015 it appears AMCU now has five full-time H&S stewards per shaft on the platinum mines (Email communication, Raphaël Botiveau, September 2016). This is objectively a step towards safer mining, the organisational consequences of institutionalisation for the trade union notwithstanding.
Conclusion: towards a new regime of individualisation and responsibilisation?
From the 1950s, under apartheid, while appearing fatalistic and stoical in the main, workers’ ‘tacit knowledge’ and skills lay at the basis of acts of resistance as disenfranchised mineworkers attempted to protect themselves underground in the context of having little value placed on their lives and being routinely blamed for accidents underground. Until at least the mid 1960s, the industry either ignored or took for granted the hard-won experientially based knowledge and skills of mineworkers. These competencies played no role in the formal organisation of work, let alone health and safety. At this point incentives and grading systems replaced institutionalised violence at work, to be shortly followed by the rupture of the early 1970s and the emergence of the independent black workers’ trade union movement. Within a decade unionisation of black mineworkers would come to the mines. With the rise of the NUM in the early 1980s, mineworkers’ ‘tacit knowledge’ and skills served to highlight deficiencies in the formal organisation of mining work. With safety as its mobilising motif, the NUM tackled mine safety at the base of the hierarchy of the mines and successfully pressed for safety legislation at the level of the democratic state in the 1990s. Formal occupational health and safety systems were subsequently negotiated, institutionalised and legitimised through rights-based legislation and tripartite institutions which positively and proactively addressed issues of safety, and less so, until very recently, health. The earlier worker-oriented focus on ‘tacit knowledge’, however, became lost in the process.
What remains unchanged over the period, despite shifts in emphasis, is the continuation of the priority of production by virtue of the bonus incentive system which acts as the ‘hidden supervisor’ underground. Cash-strapped, mineworkers depend on their bonuses and many take unnecessary risks, thereby compromising safety. Despite unionisation and a modern rights-based, consultative safety regime under democracy, not all workers feel sufficiently free to express their safety concerns or claim the right to refuse to do work they deem dangerous. A culture of blame persists in many quarters. The fear of victimisation continues to make itself felt.
At an organisational and institutional level the core mining competencies of mineworkers, predicated on ‘tacit knowledge’ arising out of practical experience, enjoyed only a brief appearance. This gave way under the institutional weight and overriding concern with procedural compliance, but which has yet to become fully generalised. Management’s behavioural mantra is to stress adherence to standards and procedural compliance as opposed to listening to ‘talking rocks’. Older workers, as well as others who chase much-needed production bonuses, continue with the entrenched practices of old, including being compelled to act in unsafe ways. When there is a shortage of labour or insufficient production materials, for instance, workers planisa (improvise) – which itself embodies ‘a rich occupational culture and deep, well-developed tacit skills’ (Phakathi 2005, 184). Despite the current safety regime, circumstances disabling workers from working safely are routinely encountered (Stewart 2012; Phakathi 2011). While procedures provide a necessary measure of security for workers when exercising their rights, countervailing pressures intrude – whether stemming from peers, from production pressure or from the practical exigencies of mining. Needless to say, individual workers must face such routine occurrences. The question as to whether developments have not come full circle arises. Might a worker be in breach of safety legislation in the event that they do not refuse to leave and continue to work in a dangerous workplace, and consequently be blamed?
More broadly, there is little doubt that casualty and fatality rates in the South African mining industry have declined significantly, issues around data collection notwithstanding. In the absence of statistical representation of the casualty and fatality rates on South African mines since the work done by Leger on the period up to 1990, illustrations are included here to show casualty rates on the South African mines for the period 1970–2013 (see Figure 1) and a comparison of fatality rates among South Africa, Australia, Canada and USA (see Figure 2).
Comparison of fatality rates – all mines: South Africa fatality rate versus Australia, Canada and USA fatality rates. Source: Chamber of Mines of South Africa annual reports for the years 2004–2014.4
Statistics of mine fatality, injury and occupational disease have historically been subject to the complaints of under-reporting. What needs to be faced, however, is that justified complaints regarding the hazards of mining persist. Whereas previously complaints fell on deaf ears, workers’ voices are indeed now being taken seriously as reflected in the new safety consciousness that the younger generation of mineworkers articulates clearly. Yet even in these new voices a sense of insecurity and vulnerability remains, as the whip of production continues to crack in the contemporary underground mining workplace.