Labour trafficking rearing ugly head in SA mining, says social scientist
Social scientist Dr Philip Frankel, in publishing a book on the Marikana killings, has opened a can of worms on labour trafficking, which he says is spilling over from illegal mining into formal mining. Camera Work: Shane Williams and Nicholas Boyd. Editing: Shane Williams.
JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Labour trafficking had reared its ugly head in South Africa’s mining sector, fuelled by the migrant labour system, mining’s short-term contracting trend and corrupt elements, social scientist Dr Philip Frankel said on Monday.
Unsuspecting people were falling into the clutches of traffickers through poverty and a lack of opportunity, said Frankel, who has just released a 180-page book on Marikana entitled Between The Rainbows and The Rain.
The book, which deals with managing the current crisis in the South African mining industry, includes a chapter that covers the contentious human exploitation phenomenon.
The former University of the Witwatersrand School of Sciences associate professor and current Agency for Social Reconstruction director told Mining Weekly Online in a video interview (see attached) that traffickers used deception to lure unsuspecting recruits into mining and then subjected them to debt bondage.
That bondage went on surreptitiously behind the formal mine structures and was often handed down from one generation to another.
“This is an area that needs to be quite considerably explored,” he said.
Police did not arrest traffickers because there was currently no law in South Africa dealing directly with labour trafficking and human trafficking.
“What we need in this country are trafficking laws,” he said.
He expected such laws to be introduced in the next few months, against the background of South Africa and Southern Africa being one of the world’s largest human-trafficking routes.
He called for a higher level of trafficking consciousness in the mining industry and South Africa as a whole, as trafficking was also taking place in other sectors, including agriculture.
He believed the incidence of labour trafficking in mining in the North West province was an indicator of something that took place in the country more widely.
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