BMWU pushes BCL Mine on fatalities� probe

Onalenna Kelebeile | Wednesday September 23, 2015 16:51

The union had planned to hijack a recent wage negotiation meeting with BCL and force the safety issue onto the agenda. However, the tactic failed as mine management maintained that the meeting was purely to continue wage negotiations.

Management asked the union to make a proper proposal for another meeting. BMWU vice president, Joseph Tsimako, said the labour body was concerned about the deaths at the mine and wanted issues of safety to be an agenda item.

“We requested that we be given an update on the cause of the last three fatalities as this was our first meeting with management since the accident,” he said.  “We are working on proposing a meeting with them and we still maintain that there was negligence on the part of management not employees in the July 18 accident.”

Tsimako said the BMWU wanted management to update them and accept negligence on its part. He added that the union would end up being compelled to conduct its own investigations on what could have transpired.

He also said reports from the inspector of mines were never given to the union yet the labour body formed part of the investigating team. As a result, the union ends up not knowing what action to take.

“We will also ensure that management puts in place measures to ensure that such incidents do not happen,” he added.

Tsimako said the union could not simply let the incident pass but wanted to follow the right processes, which could include engaging an expert to conduct investigations.

“We even want to challenge the laws of this country because we believe that as much as we are viewed as stakeholders who form part of the investigations, we are denied the right to access the reports after accidents,” he added.

“So there is a possibility that we may end up demanding the report through the courts of law.”

Following the accident, mine management indicated that preliminary findings pointed towards infringement of some safety procedures by employees and that whenever there is an incident a procedure or policy would have been flouted.

The mine also observed that some incidents are as a result of “at risk behaviours” hence the introduction of behaviour based care model last year.

In a previous interview, BCL Mine spokesperson, James Molosankwe, stressed that the mine had protocols in place to improve safety as well as behaviour-based initiatives to eliminate risk behaviours in the workplace.

“Accusations that management fails to ensure safety of its employees are baseless and misleading,” Molosankwe had said. “Management cannot take a bystander attitude in a mining operation that we know has a lot of risks.”