Cape Town - Sensitive negotiations between organised labour, lawyers and some mining houses to establish a compensation fund to settle the industry's liability to sick and injured mine workers may be jeopardised by a lawsuit filed in the Johannesburg high court last week on behalf of former workers.
The claims are for damages on behalf of gold mine workers and are test cases to secure compensation for miners affected by silicosis and pthisis (silicosis with tuberculosis). The claims also seek the establishment of a fund to be used to monitor and treat occupational respiratory disease in former gold miners, according to Richard Meeran, who filed the lawsuit.
Richard Spoor, an occupational health attorney, said this week: "Rash action, running directly to the courts using litigation as your principal strategy can have a negative impact on those discussions and delay finding solutions and be prejudicial to workers who are prejudiced by the existing compensation system."
The South African mining industry was a mature one and it was a serious concern that the industry be sustained and supported in everyone's interest, he said. "This means that rash and precipitative action is not appropriate. That is why we've been involved in long drawn-out discussions as part of a historic opportunity to address the legacy of the gold mining industry."
Spoor said that the opportunity lay in the empowerment objectives that government had set through the mining charter, which created an opportunity for empowerment and the compensation of sick mine workers to take place simultaneously.
He had been involved in an extensive consultation with organised labour and some mining houses to set up a compensation scheme to settle the industry's liability to sick and injured mine workers.
There had been discussions with experts in occupational lung diseases and the problems of dust in the mines, as well as the history of lung diseases in local mining history going back over 100 years.
Spoor said there was general consensus by everyone that dust in the mines was a significant problem, but there were questions about the precise dimension of the problem because very little research had been done in the past 50 years.
What was clear, however, was that there was a long history of neglect of the problem by the gold mining industry, which had been informed that black mine workers bore the brunt of occupational lung diseases.
"Black mine workers were treated for generations like a commodity, used, consumed and discarded when broken and damaged. We've had a legal, economic and social system that made that possible. About that there is no argument."
Spoor said the migrant labour system was at the core of the problems and was designed to provide a continuous supply of healthy strong black men to work in the mines.
Periodic medical examinations were done and if mine workers became ill, they were sent home with no pension and no medical treatment.
Until about 1986, black mine workers who contracted tuberculosis were repatriated without any medical treatment and without compensation.
The mining industry's attitude was that it did what was required of it in terms of the law. The mining houses accepted that some of the practices were wrong and unjust, but insisted that this was the responsibility of the state, he said.
