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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Women Mining Asbestos in South Africa, 1893-1980 |
Author: | McCulloch, Jock |
Year: | 2003 |
Periodical: | Journal of Southern African Studies |
Volume: | 29 |
Issue: | 2 |
Period: | June |
Pages: | 413-432 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | South Africa |
Subjects: | miners women workers work environment asbestos Women's Issues History and Exploration Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) Labor and Employment Agriculture, Natural Resources and the Environment Historical/Biographical agriculture |
External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/3557370 |
Abstract: | In the period from 1893 to 1980 the asbestos mines of the northwest Cape and the northeastern Transvaal were important sources of employment. Until the industry's twilight in the 1980s, females comprised up to half of the asbestos mine workers in South Africa. During the first phase, the women who hand-processed or cobbed fibre did the most hazardous jobs for the lowest pay. Most women probably developed asbestos-related disease (ARD). Although according to employers, Department of Mines records and the few historians who have written on the subject, women were employed by tributers to process cobs only so long as production and investment remained low, and were replaced by machinery once industrial methods of production were introduced, the shift to industrial mining was uneven and some of the work processes used in the first phase of the industry's development, particularly cobbing, survived. Even by South African standards labour conditions for black and coloured workers were harsh. A mixture of political skills and the isolation of the mines allowed British-owned companies and their subsidiaries to escape the strictures of the various Mines Acts. Notes, ref., sum. [ASC Leiden abstract] |