* Miners, families live in poverty around mines
* Pay not enough to make ends meet, miners say
* Workers face heat, dust, danger underground
By Peroshni Govender
MARIKANA, South Africa, Aug 22 (Reuters) – Children play and
dogs and chickens forage near sewage spilling from pit latrines
in the shadow of Lonmin’s Marikana mine in South Africa which
extracts the platinum used to make jewellery and auto parts.
Ramshackle settlements cluster around this mine operated by
the world no. 3 platinum producer and around others in the North
West Province, the world’s prime platinum mining region.
“This is no way to live or grow children. Fifty people share
one toilet. We don’t have water,” said a woman who identified
herself as Pinky, the wife of a striking rock drill operator at
Marikana who shares a one-room tin box with her husband and two
children.
The mine and its squalid settlement was the scene of labour
violence last week which killed 40 miners, two police and two
security guards, the deadliest security incident in South Africa
since the end of white minority rule 18 years ago.
A report this week by the Bench Marks Foundation, a
church-linked organisation that monitors corporate
responsibility, found that living conditions for South Africa’s
black miners on the platinum belt were the worst in the country.
Continued…
