Lawyers for South Africa’s asbestos victims intend using their R490-million victory against mining giants Gencor and Gefco as a precedent for suing the country’s even larger gold mining industry.
Occupational health attorney Richard Spoor said on Thursday that about 500 000 gold miners had been abandoned penniless after contracting silicosis. Silicosis fibrosis of the lung, reputed to be the oldest known occupational disease, is caused when miners inhale crystalline quartz silica dust.
”The asbestos settlement is a message for the rest of the mining industry: you will be held accountable for killing or injuring literally hundreds of thousands of miners, and for devastating the environment of entire towns,” said Spoor.
”We have, on behalf of just 37 former asbestos miners, this week established a powerful and unprecedented legal principle in South Africa, and intend using it to ensure wider social justice.”
Describing the current degree of care for ill workers as ”outrageously callous and brutal”, Spoor said not a single South African company has been criminally prosecuted for exposing its workers to toxic work conditions that cause fatal lung and other cancers.
”Lung cancer, caused by dust in mines, is classified as a natural disease in this country — the same as if a rock falls on your head. In other parts of the world, such as Britain, it’s ruled an unnatural death and results in an inquest to determine blame. There are globally accepted methods for determining this, and for calculating the price of a human life,” he said.
”But, South African mining companies have for decades used their economic and political muscle to guarantee their right to consume people’s lives at no cost at all. It isn’t a coincidence that the regions that produce almost all South Africa’s miners are also the country’s poorest and most diseased. Five generations of Transkei men have created one of the world’s richest mining industries, but they go home to extreme poverty, disease and a bitter death without hope for a better life for their children.”
Spoor’s announcement is expected to unsettle mine bosses and shareholders. An earlier confirmation that his team of lawyers was setting its sights on asbestos companies not yet party to the R490-million settlement saw Lonmin’s London share price slump by 4,2% this week.
Lonmin, formerly Lonrho, was ranked as South Africa’s fourth-biggest asbestos producer while operating its Emerentia and Wandrag mines through Duiker Exploration between 1975 and 1986. The mines were subsequently bought by commodities trading company Glencore in 2000, which in turn sold them to Xstrata, a London-listed diversified resources company that also operates vanadium mines in South Africa.
Spoor confirmed on Thursday that Lonmin and Xstrata were not his only targets.
”We are already in negotiations with what was South Africa’s third-largest asbestos exporter, Swiss-based minerals group Eternit. We’ll be meeting in Zurich in March, and are optimistic there will be an amic-able settlement,” said Spoor.
Eternit, which owned Kuruman Cape Blue Asbestos and Danielskuil Cape Blue Asbestos, will be requested to contribute towards the new national asbestos trust as part of a campaign to raise its endowment to a minimum of R800-million.
The third of Spoor’s new asbestos targets, Anglo American, will however be a tougher nut to crack.
Anglo American had a 40% stake in Charter Consolidated, which controlled asbestos mining company Cape until the early 1980s.
”Anglo has never been in the asbestos mining business and never operated or managed asbestos mines or plants,” insisted Anglo spokeswoman Anne Dunn.
Spoor concedes that the legal grounds are ‘murky’, but argues that Anglo is ”the grand daddy of South African asbestos mining. It spawned both Gefco and Cape, and therefore has an overwhelming moral obligation.”
”Asbestos poisoning is not a purely legal matter. It’s about as close as you get to large-scale murder and massive corporate maleficence. The evidence that exposure to asbestos was extremely harmful has been available since the 1960s, but absolutely nothing was done to protect workers,” he said.
Spoor and his backers, British labour union attorneys Thompson’s, were meanwhile still finalising the exact details of the Gencor/Gefco settlement in Johannesburg on Thursday.
The settlement will see Gencor pay R460,5-million and Gefco R30-million as an endowment into the proposed national trust, which is expected to operate for at least 25 years.
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Chernobyl of the Northern Cape 10 January 2003