The practice of migrant workers returning to their homes only once or sometimes twice a year was inhumane, Shanduka executive chairperson Cyril Ramaphosa wrote in a Chamber of Mines- (CoM-) sponsored mass-media article last year.
In the second of a five-day CoM print campaign on what the mining industry got wrong, Ramaphosa cited the infrequent opportunity to return home as a practice that undermined the social structure and economy of labour-sending areas.
In the double-page broadsheet advertorial – which included articles by National Union of Mineworkers general secretary Frans Baleni, Webber Wentzel Africa mining head Peter Leon, Cadiz Corporate Solutions mining head Peter Major and scenario planner and former Anglo American executive Clem Sunter – Ramaphosa declared it a moral imperative for mining companies to attend holistically to the living experience of their workers.
He said that migrant labourers were never fully resident in the areas where they worked, and were rarely present in the places they called home.
But because of the dependence of the labour-sending areas on the wages of migrant workers, and in the absence of real economic development of these areas, it was neither desirable nor feasible to end the practice of migrant labour.
“If the business of mining depends on the displacement of workers, then addressing the impact of that displacement needs to become the responsibility of the mining company,” he said.
Employers could not merely confine their concerns to working conditions and needed to assume far greater responsibility for the conditions under which workers lived.
Workers living close to work in water-served and electricity-reticulated dwellings and who were able to afford adequate nutrition and had vastly improved family lives were likely to be more productive.
They were also likely to remain with the mine for longer, improving skill retention and increasing stability.
While mining companies might not have legal responsibility for the provision of municipal infrastructure, they needed to accept moral responsibility for how their workers lived.
“They need to explore new, innovative approaches to social housing and service provision. “They need to work more closely with local authorities and to dedicate more resources to addressing this challenge,” he added in the article.
The current turmoil in the mining industry, he believed, was in large measure the result of the inability to attend adequately to the economic and social needs of the people most directly involved in the industry – the workers and the communities that hosted them.