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South Africa: Task Force Guides Mines to Safety Goals
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Business Day (Johannesburg)
8 May 2008
Posted to the web 8 May 2008
Edward West
Johannesburg
TRANSFORMING behaviour and attitudes towards mine safety is not an easy task, but it is one from which the industry's mine o ccupational s afety and health t ask force cannot shy away .
Established under the auspices of the Chamber of Mines, a pilot project was started to help mines adopt pockets of best safety practice from January this year.
"We need to make safety part and parcel of production through the adoption of best practice and compliance with rules and regulations," says Chamber of Mines spokesman Jabu Maphalala.
The task force was set up by the c hamber's executive council in 2006 to formulate strategies to reduce fatalities by 20% a year from the 2003 industry figure, to reach international safety benchmarks by 2013.
The industry realised at the time that its 10-year targets proposed at the third Mine Health and Safety Council summit in 2003, were not being attained even though the safety records in some sectors and at some mines were better than others.
At last year's Employer Health and Safety Summit, the task force recommended a system be implemented to share the best practices across the industry.
Four teams of eight people each have been assigned full-time to the initiative, with full access to senior mining executives. The teams are focusing on strategies to help mines reduce dust pollution and silicosis, noise pollution, ground collapses and to strengthen their leadership.
Maphalala said some of the reasons overall mine safety performances in the US, Canada and Australia may be better than SA could be a combination of the relatively higher age of SA mines and the related mining methods which also tend to be more labour intensive.
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He says a large part of the task teams' project relates to communication to encourage the adoption of best behavioural and technological practice in matters of health and safety; to overcome the challenges of viewing production as being separate from safety issues; to overcome resistance to new ideas, and why bonuses and incentives are linked to production and not mine safety issues.
"To say 'we told them' doesn't work. Our job is to transform behaviour patterns and to engender eager adoption of best practice, which is much harder than just telling people what to do or how it is done, which doesn't really work," Maphalala said.
"One of the biggest challenges is how to ensure that a safety-conscious culture, which we are promoting at the work place, is carried outside where the same people have to interact with others in environments where the opposite in lifestyle seems to be the norm," he said.
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