The organisation that was set up more than 100 years ago to acquire cheap black mineworkers by the cubic metre for the gold mines is now intent on “reversing out” the social ills that the migrant labour system has heaped on South Africa’s perennially unsettled mining sector.

It wants to do this through a combination of shift reform, mineworker work-life solutions, connecting former migrants with money still owed to them and the coordination of the development initiatives of the many mining companies.

Teba Limited has been investigating a number of initiatives with the employers and with employees on migrant labour reform, including the implementation in the short term of a new system of affording migrant mineworkers more time at home with their families in the labour-sending areas.

“We can now run the machinery of this business in the opposite direction and help to redress the social problems that have arisen from the migrant labour system,” Teba CEO Graham Herbert tells Mining Weekly of the company headed by executive chairperson Dr James Motlatsi, a former 40c-a-shift mineworker and founding president of the National Union of Mineworkers.

A change to the shift system has been advanced to the point where some of the gold producers are seriously looking at a scenario of migrants working for six weeks and then going home for a week – and thereby providing leeway for more near-mine community members to be recruited by mines and fewer migrants being taken on in order to phase out the system over time.

“There’s serious thinking going on about this,” says Herbert.

A commitment to reduce the social impact of migrancy has been expressed most forcefully to date by Neal Froneman’s Sibanye Gold, which is pioneering a piloting of the six-weeks-on, one-week-off shift experiment.

However, the upshot of the shift change is a requirement for more labour, which may be dealt with best through a partnership with government, business and labour, so that localised labour opportunities are maximised.

The other aspect is the housing, where Teba knows through its research that the overwhelming majority of mineworkers do not want to own mine houses at the mines.

“Those that live far away want to have houses in the places where they live and that’s a researched fact,” Herbert tells Mining Weekly.

To assist with housing in labour-sourcing areas, Teba is developing new products linked to incremental cashless loans that enable mineworkers to renovate or build homes where they live and not close to mines.

The organisation is confident that there are practical ways of achieving that and is testing those products right now.

The third big thing is health and the impact of the strike on the health of platinum workers is going to be bad.

But looking forward, attempts are being made to reach agreement on a standardised treatment protocol, continuity of care and a seamless way of ensuring that sick people who go back to labour-sending areas are properly looked after.

What used to be a palliative service is now a funding mechanism that enables mineworkers to complete their treatment and get well again in a seamless way, even though they may be crossing international borders.

There also needs to be a funding mechanism to support a programme that gives mineworkers access to their biennial medical examinations, which enables them to have access to the cash they are owed.

Drawing out one specific example of lung disease, namely silicosis, caused through the inhalation of dust, Teba is working closely with the Medical Bureau for Occupational Diseases to find the 200 000 men who have already been assessed for lung damage and who are owed money.

But backlogs remain and the issue of who pays remains a stumbling block.

At the moment, the people paying are the beneficiaries of provident funds, long-service awards.

“They get so desperate for their money that they are prepared to give up to half of it away just in order to get their R50 000,” says Herbert, who adds that for trustees to continue to say that this service should somehow be provided free by Teba is nonsense.

Sixty per cent of people can be found easily through a desktop trace but the rest have to be looked for physically.

Teba estimates that, in the gold and platinum space, there are 250 000 people owed about R6-billion.

The scale of money owed to beneficiaries represents one year’s payment of annual South African social grants.

Teba believes it has the wherewithal and the community contacts to find and pay all the missing people in five years.

The third mining industry need is the joint implementation of social and labour plan projects in rural areas, which Teba believes can be done, but which mining companies fear doing in case the Department of Mineral Resources sees it as not fulfilling their obligations.

The experience over the last five years is that these ad hoc projects are being poorly coordinated by the mining industry and are not achieving the impact that they should have in this 2014 black economic-empowerment audit year.

Being a structural problem, the migrant labour system requires short-, medium- and long-term plans that need total buy-in.
Industrial sociologist Gavin Hartford last year placed the migrant labour system at the heart of South Africa’s mining unrest, saying that its punishing yearly work cycle spawned social evils.

The Esop Shop CEO proposed that a new migratory labour model be founded on human dignity and shorter work cycles, within a continuous-operation scenario.

Southern African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy president Dr Gordon Smith, writing in the institute journal, said the migrant-labour issue had moved beyond being an industry issue alone and was now part of the fabric of life in South Africa as a whole.

Smith advocated that it be changed progressively and in a way that did not worsen poverty levels in the rural areas from which the labour was being sent.