Abstract
BackgroundSouth Africa’s mineral resources have produced, and continue to produce, enormous economic wealth; yet decades of colonialism, apartheid, capital flight, and challenges in the neoliberal post-apartheid era have resulted in high rates of occupational lung disease and low rates of compensation for ex-miners and their families. Given growing advocacy and activism of current and former mine workers, initiatives were launched by the South African government in 2012 to begin to address the legacy of injustice. This study aimed to assess developments over the last 5 years in providing compensation, quantify shortfalls and explore underlying challenges.MethodsUsing the database with compensable disease claims from over 200,000 miners, the medical assessment database of 400,000 health records and the employment database with 1.6 million miners, we calculated rates of claims, unpaid claims and shortfall in claim filing for each of the southern African countries with at least 25,000 miners who worked in South African mines, by disease type and gender. We also conducted interviews in Johannesburg, Eastern Cape, Lesotho and a local service unit near a mine site, supplemented by document review and auto-reflection, adopting the lens of a critical rights-based approach.ResultsBy the end of 2017, 111,166 miners had received compensation (of which 55,864 were for permanent lung impairment, and another 52,473 for tuberculosis), however 107,714 compensable claims remained unpaid. Many (28.4%) compensable claims are from Mozambique, Lesotho, Swaziland, Botswana and elsewhere in southern Africa, a large proportion of which have been longstanding. A myriad of diverse systemic barriers persist, especially for workers and their families outside South Africa. Calculating predicted burden of occupational lung disease compared to compensable claims paid suggests a major shortfall in filing claims in addition to the large burden of still unpaid claims.ConclusionDespite progress made, our analysis reveals ongoing complex barriers and illustrates that the considerable underfunding of the systems required for sustained prevention and social protection (including compensation) needs urgent attention. With class action suits in the process of settlement, the globalized mining sector is now beginning to be held accountable. A critical rights-based approach underlines the importance of ongoing concerted action by all.
Highlights
South Africa’s mineral resources have produced, and continue to produce, enormous economic wealth; yet decades of colonialism, apartheid, capital flight, and challenges in the neoliberal post-apartheid era have resulted in high rates of occupational lung disease and low rates of compensation for ex-miners and their families
In an article in Globalization and Health almost 10 years ago analyzing tuberculosis in miners who had worked in South African mines, Basu and colleagues called for immediate actions to address the health and social inequities created by the mining sector in South Africa, noting that “the mining industry is not paying the full price” of the lung disease it was creating; they drew attention to “a critical absence of a focal point of government leadership” [11]
Moving beyond scholarship on the impact of tuberculosis and other lung diseases associated with mining in the region, there is a critical need to grapple with what it means to create a more equitable compensation system for those from across southern Africa who worked in South African mines – for corporations that are primarily global in their ownership and trading relations
Summary
South Africa’s mineral resources have produced, and continue to produce, enormous economic wealth; yet decades of colonialism, apartheid, capital flight, and challenges in the neoliberal post-apartheid era have resulted in high rates of occupational lung disease and low rates of compensation for ex-miners and their families. The extensive mineral resources of South Africa have produced, and continue to produce, enormous wealth in aggregate economic terms; yet decades of colonialism, apartheid, flight of capital from the region, and challenges in the neoliberal post-apartheid era have left hundreds of thousands of mine workers in southern Africa with occupational lung disease, along with associated health, economic and social consequences [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. The issue of redressing injustices linked to unhealthy and unfair mining conditions has risen to the top of the political agenda in South Africa in recent years This was again illustrated in the words of the new President of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, speaking in February 2018 about the critical importance of “healing and atonement” following the 2012 massacre of 34 striking mineworkers [12]. We first briefly present some essential historical background, the methods and results of our analysis of recent developments
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