Precedent Setting Civil Action Instituted Against Anglo Gold Ashanti Ltd.Due to their economic and political power the mining industry has been able to secure and maintain a dispensation whereby the benefits afforded all other workers with occupational diseases are not extended to Mineworkers who contract occupational lung diseases as a result there are long-term exposure to harmful dust and gasses underground. As a result the levies paid by the mining industry to the statutory compensation scheme are just a fraction of the amount that they would otherwise have paid if Mineworkers received the same benefits as industrial workers. This means bigger profits for shareholders. A very cheap form of compensation. A subsidy. One of the principal economic rationales for apartheid was securing the provision of a large quantities of cheap and disposable black labour to the South African gold mining industry. It was a system whereby millions of black workers subsidised the obscene profits of the goldmining industry with their health and their lives. The consequences are still felt throughout those parts of southern Africa from whence mine labour was drawn. Lesotho, the Eastern Cape, Mozambique, Malawi and Northern KwaZulu Natal remain the most impoverished and underdeveloped parts of the subcontinent. This is a direct consequence of the service that generations of healthy young men gave to the gold mining industry at enormous cost to them, their families and their communities. This litigation is an attempt to hold the gold mining industry accountable for the crimes and outrages of the past. This is a history and present for which the South African gold mining industry has to date refused to accept any responsibility notwithstanding the gross and manifest injustice that the industry has visited upon those who served it. AngloGold Ashanti is publicly committed " to fulfilling its obligations and duties as a responsible corporate citizen, ensuring that its behaviour reflects a genuine concern for its stakeholders, including shareholders, employees, their families and the communities and environments in which we live and work. AngloGold Ashanti aims to operate workplaces that are safe and healthy, to ensure that the environments in which we work remain ecologically sound and sustainable, and to ensure that the communities in which we operate derive real social and economic benefits from our presence." Unless the company takes responsibility for the lot of the thousands of loyal employees, like Thembekile Mankayi, who served it for many years but who now find themselves destitute,crippled and maimed after contracting occupational diseases caused by the unsafe and unhealthy working conditions to which they were exposed, these fine words ring hollow. It is hoped that AngloGold will acknowledge that it has a responsibility to Mr Mankayi, who has become sick and disabled not through any fault of his own but because he loyally served the company. Anglo Gold Ashanti had a responsibility to provide Mr Mankayi with a safe and healthy work environment but failed to do so. Now AngloGold must take responsibility for the consequences of their failure to meet their responsibilities. It is also hoped that this litigation will assist in focusing attention on the urgent need for a complete overhaul of the legislation dealing with compensation for occupational disease under the ODMWA. The legislation is a relic of the Apartheid past, the last of legislation to be de-racialised yet otherwise remaining unchanged it is manifestly unjust and inequitable, it discriminates against mines and risks workers and is a powerful disincentive to employers to take health and safety in the workplace seriously. The law condemns injured workers and their families to destitution and subsidises the killing and maiming of workers by employers. The Occupational Diseases in Mines and Works Act ,which regulates compensation for mine workers who contract occupational lung diseases is an absolute disgrace that cannot be defended and is in fact not defended by anyone. It persists because the resistance of employers and the state to paying fair compensation weighs more heavily on the collective mind of the legislature than do the cries of misery and hunger emitting from thousands of homes in rural and impoverished Southern Africa. Shame upon them. This is not the first attempt to hold the gold mining industry accountable through litigation, Australian based class-action lawyer Richard Meeran, has in conjunction with the Legal Resources Centre, instituted proceedings against Anglo-American PLC in an attempt to hold them responsible for the delicts committed by their subsidiary gold mining companies. The association of lawyers involved in the Mankayi litigation will shortly institute further legal proceedings against the gold mining industry and the State to challenge the constitutionality of the discriminatory and highly prejudicial compensation regime applicable to Mineworkers. The law firms participating in this litigation, are the Washington based, public interest and class-action law firm of Cohen Millstein Hausfeld Toll, who achieved renown in the successful Holocaust litigation brought against Swiss Banks in the 1990's, Abrahams Kiewiets, a Cape Town-based law firm well known for its participation in the apartheid reparations class-action litigation currently on appeal in the New York courts and Richard Spoor an occupational health and safety lawyer of White River Mpumalanga. For further information please contact Richard Spoor
richardspoor@iafrica.com
0836271722
0137511662
Fax 013 7501047 Charles Abrahams
Abrahams Kiewitz Attorneys
charles@ak.law.za
Tel: 021-914-4842 |
