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Title: | Studded with diamonds and paved with gold: miners, mining companies and human rights in southern Africa |
Author: | Flynn, Laurie |
Year: | 1992 |
Pages: | 358 |
Language: | English |
City of publisher: | London |
Publisher: | Bloomsbury |
ISBN: | 0747511551 |
Geographic term: | South Africa |
Subjects: | work environment labour migration mining mine accidents |
Abstract: | In 1986 in Kinross, South Africa, 177 miners died in an avoidable accident, the consequence of the Gencor company's profit-over-safety policy. Many abuses of human rights persist in South Africa's mining industry, the biggest employer of labour and the country's main generator of wealth. In this investigation the author, journalist and filmmaker, looks at the historical links between the wealth of London (where much of the mine financing is arranged) and the rural poverty in South Africa. He examines the safety and accident record of a mining industry where one human being dies for every ton of gold mined while the causes of preventable disasters are seldom properly probed by public inquiries. He exposes the cruelty of the migrant labour system and the conditions of the mining compounds. He also traces the rise of a black miners' union, illegal before 1982, the events behind the 1986 emergency, and the hard times that obtained before 1990. |