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Johannesburg - A lawyer for hundreds of former South
African gold miners accused their ex-employers on Wednesday of failing to
provide access to regular check-ups for silicosis, an incurable lung disease
caused by inhaling dust.
Richard Meeran of London law firm Leigh Day said thousands
of miners in South Africa's impoverished Eastern Cape province had missed out
on compensation because they had been denied access to free, two-yearly tests,
in contravention of South African laws protecting the rights of ex-miners.
A lack of occupational health units able to carry out the
medical examination, which involves a chest x-ray and breath-test, was first
known in 1996 but little had been done to remedy the situation, Meeran said.
“It’s a scandal,” he told a news conference in Johannesburg.
“Fifteen years after this issue was raised, nothing seems to
have changed at all. In the intervening period, thousands of people must have
been deprived of compensation. Who knows how many must have died.”
The allegations follow a landmark ruling by South Africa’s
Constitutional Court this year which allowed lung-diseased miners to sue their
employers, rather than simply accept standard compensation packages.
The ruling may open the door for tens of thousands of former
mineworkers to sue South African companies at a cost analysts estimate to be up
to $100bn.
Meeran said medical researchers had found silicosis in 25%
of former miners in the region, historically one of the main sources of labour
for an industry that, at its height, employed half a million men.
He is already representing 700 silicosis-afflicted miners,
most of them from the Eastern Cape, in a suit in London seeking “billions of
rand” in compensation from London-based mining giant Anglo American [JSE:AGL].
Anglo American South Africa, the wholly owned entity being
sued by the miners, was one of the world’s largest gold miners through much of
the 20th century.
At the height of South African gold production under
apartheid, many black miners worked without respirators and had no access to
on-site showers, making them vulnerable to inhaling the crystalline silica dust
that causes silicosis.
South Africa's cash-strapped health authorities were partly
to blame for the Eastern Cape failings, Meeran said, although mining firms bore
the ultimate responsibility for a condition that can set in years after a
worker has left the mines.
“The industry can’t just wash its hand of people once they leave the gate of the mine,” Meeran said.
South Africa’s Chamber of Mines, the main industry body, was
not immediately available for comment.
