While walking very slowly to enter his home in Embalenhle in South Africa, Lindane Mkwanazi tries to cough to clear his throat, but immediately a stabbing pain in his chest attacks him; she tries to hold her breath so as not to feel the pain and continues finding relief only when she manages to sit down to rest. Mr Mkwanazi contracted a chronic lung disease by working in the coal mines for over ten years and breathing the very fine black dust which, over time, settled in his bronchi causing irreparable health problems.
When he started working for a large mining company he had high hopes for himself and his family, but before those dreams could be realized, doctors diagnosed Lindane with the serious pathology that left him incapacitated: there was there was nothing he could do to earn a living anymore because, with his medical history, no one was willing to give him a job and with the first health problems, with medical care difficult to sustain and not covered by state hospitals, here comes also financial troubles with the bank requesting his eviction because he is unable to meet the mortgage payments. Lindane does not know what would have happened without the incessant support of his wife who, working as a domestic worker, has managed to provide for the daily expenses and education of her children and her bitter story is similar, if not the same, to that of thousands of former miners who have become seriously ill over the years due to failure to comply with the most basic protection measures in the workplace. To denounce the precarious conditions in the country’s mines, the Catholic Church of Southern Africa together with Richard Spoors attorney has undertaken a class-action, a collective legal action, against some mining companies and their subsidiaries which for years have ignored well-being and the right to health of its employees and in a nation, still today, heavily dependent on coal for energy production, mining, already a harsh working environment, becomes even more dangerous if carried out without due precautions.
«The Church is always concerned about the well-being of the people with whom we work and live. It is therefore up to the Church to provide assistance where it can so that the rights of the weak are respected and so that they can access the compensation that is legally due to them.” With these words Monsignor Stephen Brislin, archbishop of Cape Town and among the new cardinals chosen by Pope Francis, sets out in black and white the Church’s mission alongside African workers in a statement released on 15 August by the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference ( S. A. C. B. C. ), which includes the bishops of Botswana, South Africa and Eswatini.
Filed at the provincial seat of the High Court of South Africa in Gauteng by the legal firm Richard Spoor, a human rights expert, the class action is a real indictment against South32, a company based in Perth, Australia and all companies that, like you, are held responsible for having omitted the basic prevention strategies to safeguard human health. Specifically, according to the press release from the local Catholic authorities, the miners fell ill with pneumoconiosis and other chronic lung diseases due to the dust which, inhaled for a long period, irreparably compromised the respiratory organs, causing, in some cases, extremely disabling pathologies. . There are no effective and definitive treatments for these diseases and the only possible remedy remains prevention, which is crucial for the protection of coal workers, using technical measures in the mining site together with personal protective equipment: completely unexpected protocols from the Australian company which , for this reason, was called to answer for compensation. The dispute recently promoted by the Richard Spoor attorneys and Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference is only the latest action, in chronological order, that the local Church has undertaken for workers’ rights in a country where, several times, the bishops have denounced “the human costs ” of the coal industry caused by the willful omission of the most basic risk containment actions.
As Father Stan Muyebe, the coordinator of the Justice and Peace Commission of the S.A.C.B.C., told our newspaper, already during apartheid the success of the mining and agricultural sectors was built with massive exploitation of labor which the Church has always sought to set a limit through the associations of young Christian workers who played a fundamental role in the creation of the unions which, with mixed success, tried to defend the rights of their members. With the end of segregation, from the early 1990s, South Africa inherited thousands of former miners who fell ill precisely because profit was preferred to human dignity and helpless in the face of the excessive power of multinationals, they were refused every request of compensation. Despite the government’s passage of stricter legislation, the problem of safety, low wages and, in general, poor living conditions is still pressing. «To escape the stringent labor regulations – continues Muyebe – most mining companies have now resorted to using contract workers who are inserted into the mines through labor brokers. These contract workers do not fall under the protection of current labor legislation and cannot join trade unions: those on contract are the poorest of the poor.” With the class actions undertaken over the years, also with the help of Richard Spoor Attorneys, in the past it has already happened that the miners of absestos and gold metals obtained compensation for the suffering suffered and it is for this reason that even today the local Church takes care of the workers’ requests, trying to facilitate negotiations that lead to a settlement agreement for their benefit. «By embracing the cause of sick miners – concludes the coordinator of the Justice and Peace Commission – we have made the effort to become a Samaritan Church that reaches out in brotherhood to those who are on the margins of the mining economy, trying to bind the wounds of poor workers whose dignity has been outraged; it is a ministry to bring the hope of God into the situation of economic exclusion, recognizing that in the sick miners there is our Lord who tells us: “I was sick among the miners and you visited me””.
Source: https://www.osservatoreromano.va/it/news/2023-10/quo-230/ammalarsi-di-lavoro.html
