After a meeting of Sikhala Sonke in the informal settlement of Wonderkop, Marikana.
We examine the different ways that women’s lives are shaped by mining: women in labour sending areas, who historically formed the invisible backbone of South Africa’s mines; women who have migrated from traditional homes to live near the mines; women who were born and raised in areas where the mines are found; and women who have recently started working in the mines. These are not distinct categories. Women’s lives are fluid, changing as the industry and society itself change. Our study focuses on Lonmin, with its bloody history of the 2012 Marikana massacre. The story women tell here is not a one-off event or disaster but of embedded and ongoing strategies used by platinum companies, supported by transnational companies, to maximise profits, profits which flow from the lives and work done by women as much as from the labour of men. We ask: what has changed or not changed around women’s roles in the platinum mines since the 1990s? What has been done to improve women’s lives? How do these changes impact on the behaviours of both women and men? How does this affect the lives of women today?
Backdrop: Apartheid, social reproduction and migrant labour
The mines, and cheap migrant labour to the mines, formed the soil in which South Africa’s ingrained racism and apartheid flourished. From the 1870s, South African mines relied on the labour of low-paid black migrant men who came from distant rural areas to work underground, living in single-sex hostels, while women remained in far removed rural areas, today called labour sending areas (LSAs), previously named native reserves, Bantustans and homelands. Scholars have described how these racialised and gendered workforce structures ‘externalised’ the cost of reproductive labour for the black working class from the mine companies to the LSAs. Wages paid to (black, male) mineworkers were insufficient to support families nor did wages pay for community infrastructure, schools and health facilities to sustain the supply of mine labour. Instead, women in LSAs carried the costs of supporting families that provided labour to the mines, bringing up children who would later work in the mines and caring for returning sick mineworkers and the elderly. Wolpe summarised this ‘externalisation of reproductive labour costs’ in 1972:
The extended family in the reserves is able to, and does, fulfil ‘social security’ functions necessary for the reproduction of the migrant workforce. By caring for the very young and very old, the sick, the migrant labourer in periods of ‘rest’, by educating the young, etc., the reserve families relieve the capitalist sector and its state from the need to expend resources on these necessary functions (Wolpe, 1995:67).
Scholars have done relatively little research on how gender discrimination and oppression emerged from, and reinforced, this structure of mine labour. Apartheid’s pass system forced men to come alone to the mines while families – women, children, those too old to work – were left in (or removed to) ‘tribal areas’. Apartheid laws, backed by a battery of gendered behaviour, patriarchy and state violence, forced women to remain in the homelands. A typical woman’s story said:
My husband was working in the mines. I married him in 1968, he was already a mineworker. [...] We had no food to put on the table. He would stay there the whole year and come back with that little money. [In 1988...] he came back and spent a month with us, then went to hospital from breathing problems, then he passed away. They called me into TEBA and gave me R2,000 for the funeral (Seidman and Bonase, 2015:54).
Cash sent home by the mineworker was never enough. Family members left in the LSAs – especially women – supplemented inadequate remittances with subsistence farming and other non-cash survival mechanisms, mostly ‘traditional’ women’s work of building homes, gathering wood for fuel, carrying water. Women held together families (often extended families) while their men were away. After 1948, apartheid solidified this: where you lived and worked, how you survived, was defined by race, by ‘tribe’ and by gender. In sum, cheap black labour to the mines was extensively subsidised by African households. Thus black women’s labour underpinned profits made from South African mines.
What happened in post-apartheid society?
Studies today show how South Africa’s platinum mines have perpetuated, adapted and reinvented key aspects of the apartheid mine labour system. Older mineworkers speak of an unbroken continuum of migrant labour and underdevelopment. Younger mineworkers say: ‘We are the youth of this democracy. But we came here to find these same conditions where our forefathers, our fathers were working, it has not changed: the same dust, the same air, polluted air, the tools and everything, the same that have killed our fathers’ (Seidman and Bonase, 2015:3).
The end of apartheid did not end entrenched poverty and underdevelopment in LSAs. Rather, the mines adapted to fit new legal and political frameworks, leaving structural faults intact. The post-apartheid state took several steps aimed at ending migrant labour. It removed apartheid laws relegating women and families to the LSAs, and it ended single-sex hostels at the mines.
Government also ended regulations that barred women from mine work. The 1911 Mines and Works Act had categorically stated that ‘no person shall employ underground on any mine a boy apparently under the age of sixteen years or any female’ (Alexander, 2007:214). The Minerals Act of 1991 also banned women from working underground (Simango, 2006:15). But later laws replaced these: the Mine Health and Safety Act (1996), the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act (MPRDA of 2002) and the Broad-Based Socio-Economic Empowerment Charter (Mining Charter of 2002).
Today, in theory, mine companies implement these laws. Yet, in practice, men work in the mines while women stay ‘at home’ in LSAs. Numerous factors drive this: historical patterns of employment and work; structural underdevelopment in LSAs; and the failure to build viable communities near the mines. Gender discrimination remains key to all of these.
Employment patterns entrench migrant labour
In South Africa today, (black, male) miners still do not earn a living wage that supports the miner and his dependants. Research in 2008 showed that permanently employed workers across the Platinum Belt, including Lonmin’s Marikana mine, took home R3,000 (200 euro) a month while contract workers took home less (Webster et al., 2008). By 2012 workers reported earning between R4,000 and R6,000 (270–400 Euro) (Benya, 2012a). The 2012 strike of rock drill operators at Marikana, followed by strikes across the Platinum Belt in 2014, demanded a monthly wage of R12,500 (800 euro), double the take-home pay of many rock drill operators.
Low wages mean that families cannot survive on what the mineworker sends home. This in turn determines the course of women’s lives and work in mining communities and LSAs. In the last 20 years, laws covering mine recruitment and employment were extensively rewritten. New laws require mines to hire workers on permanent contracts and to hire locally where possible. Platinum mines must by law provide statistics to government agencies to prove compliance with these laws (Benya, 2015c:70). But the new regulations leave a large grey area between ‘permanent’ employment, defined-term contracts (employment for specific jobs for a set time) and subcontracted work (where other companies subcontract to do work for the mine).
Rather than hiring permanent employees, mine companies bend regulations by using labour brokers and subcontracting work. Mines engage labour brokers to hire workers, the broker signs a contract with the worker and then sells his labour to the mine. With subcontractors, mines contract a smaller company to do a specific job and the subcontractor then hires workers to do the work. The mining industry estimates that 29 per cent of all mineworkers are subcontracted. In 2012, Anglo Platinum (Amplats), Lonmin and Impala Platinum (Implats) reported that between 7 and 30 per cent of workers were subcontracted (Forrest, 2013). But independent researchers report that on some platinum mines as much as 60 per cent of the workforce is subcontracted: ‘The use of these subcontracting workers has been highest in the platinum sector [...]. For example, in 2005, 54,667 of a total of 96,734 employees in the platinum group metals were outsourced [...]’ (cited in Gwatidzo and Benhura, 2013:14).
Contract workers are usually hired to work in more hazardous areas of mines. When mines compile statistics for compliance reports that monitor the Labour Relations Act, the Health and Safety Act and the Mining Charter, they often leave out workers employed through labour brokers and subcontractors. This was more the case for Health and Safety statistics. In 2007, for example, the Financial Mail reported that the Chamber of Mines (an employer organisation) was selectively reporting accidents and fatalities, only when an accident has more than four deaths, presumably excluding those affecting subcontracted workers. They reported that between 2000 and 2005 the Chamber only reported 90 deaths in 15 incidents while the Department of Mineral Resources recorded 1,584 fatalities and 26,893 accidents (Financial Mail, 10 August 2007).
Platinum mines boast that they pay employees far more than workers in other fields. But workers hired by labour brokers and subcontractors do not work for the mine. Even where permanent employees and subcontracted miners work on the same team, subcontractors may offer different conditions, pay and work structures to those given to permanent employees. Subcontracted workers can earn less than half of what a permanent employee earns for the same job. While all platinum miners work overtime (often up to 12 hours a day), permanent employees receive standard overtime pay and benefits; contracted labour get less overtime and benefits or none at all. Contract workers often work under less safe conditions than full-time mine employees.2 Contract labour often has no union protection or job security. One labour broker admitted, ‘We have no union members and we don’t bargain wages.’ Subcontractors and labour brokers also undermine post-apartheid efforts to end migrant labour. The Mining Charter requires mines to hire local residents, but labour brokers hire mineworkers coming from far off at the local recruiting office near the mine:
Labour brokers prefer experienced retrenched mineworkers as they come with skills, such as rock drilling, and tend to be less educated whilst requiring little or no training. Many of these workers had previously been recruited by TEBA for the gold mines but now return to register with brokers. In order to get employment they present themselves as locals thus allowing mines to comply with the Mining Charter and simultaneously avoid the levy on the recruitment of foreign labour (Forrest, 2013).
Further, although new mining legislation encourages mines to employ women as well as locals, the preference for migrant workers means that brokers also overlook women for mine jobs.
Underdevelopment in labour sending areas
A known cause of underdevelopment in the LSAs is that workers too ill or unfit or old to work are sent back home to become a burden on their families. Mine companies today boast of improved health measures for workers in prevention, treatment, and disability pay. But companies still find ways to shift the burden of ill health, disability and death onto mineworkers’ families (especially onto women) and onto the (inadequate) public health system in LSAs.
Companies by law provide regular medical check-ups and treatment for employees at the mines. Yet workers complain that a check-up once a year picks up serious illness only after it has spread. The worker who is diagnosed with serious illness is hospitalised, but if he does not recover he is sent home. Injury or occupational disease ends the worker’s income, then he returns home to add financial strain to the family and daily burdens of care work performed by women. Ex-workers and families fail to access pensions, disability and death benefits, further feeding underdevelopment in LSAs. Families have no choice but to send another younger, healthy member to the mines, reinforcing the cycle of impoverishment and underdevelopment at their home areas (Seidman and Bonase, 2015).
In the LSAs, underfunded public health clinics rarely have resources to treat these illnesses. Moreover, mine health facilities do not diagnose or treat miner’s family members, even when the family member has a mine-linked illness like TB or HIV. Women therefore carry the burden of care for ill mineworkers without compensation or support from the mines. Some women forgo their own jobs and deplete limited household resources to care for men who are injured at the mine or whose lungs have been ravished by mine dust. When the ex-mineworker dies, the family is poorer through lack of income and may be sick from contagious mine-related disease.
At the mines
We cannot bring our families here – there is nothing for them here, this is no way to live. (Seidman and Bonase, 2015:35)
The post-apartheid democratic dispensation presumed that mineworkers would bring their families to live near the mines. The mines agreed to convert single-men hostels into family living units or pay workers a ‘living-out allowance’ to find housing for their families near the mines. Today the platinum mines give about a third of mineworkers a ‘living-out allowance’ of around R1,800 (120 euro) per month. But mineworkers say this amount does not pay for suitable accommodation, food and transport for a single person living near the mine, far less for a family.
Further, there are no decent family houses available, nor infrastructure to support viable communities, near the mines. Mineworkers spend ‘living-out allowances’ to rent illegal and un-serviced shacks in informal settlements that are rife with health risks, crime and environmental degradation, without their families (Bench Marks Foundation, 2011:42).
In 2013, the Bench Marks Foundations noted:
The overwhelming majority of Lonmin’s 28,230 established employees stay in informal settlements or in township shacks. As for the additional 8,300 contract workers, for which accommodation Lonmin takes no responsibility, their residence in informal settlements is almost given by definition. According to a very well-placed source, Lonmin estimates that it provides acceptable accommodation for about 5,000 out of over 28,000 established employees.
Evidence at the Farlam Commission of Inquiry showed that Lonmin consistently failed to meet legal commitments made in social responsibility agreements with the government to provide housing for workers. Between 2007 and 2010, Lonmin promised to build 5,500 houses for workers and convert 92 hostels to family units but only built three show houses and converted five hostel blocks. By 2012, Lonmin had built no more houses, although it had converted 108 hostel blocks (Bapo Ba Mogale, 2014).3 As well as no decent housing near the mines, there is little or no infrastructure for homes: roads, sewerage, sanitation, water, electricity, schools or clinics. ‘We do not have good roads. We would like the mine come here and help these people build better roads, so we can go to work. But also this water: we drink it because it is all we have. It can make you sick, see, it is brown from that tap. But we do drink it’ (Seidman and Bonase, 2015:43).
Neither mining companies nor local government take responsibility for mineworker settlements. Under South African law, mine companies own mineral rights but not the surface of the land. Since mine companies do not own the surface, they are unwilling to provide infrastructure for communities that build on it (even where communities consist of mine employees). Local authorities also refuse to construct infrastructure for new settlements where the mines own underground rights since, as the mines expand, blasting and digging destroys the new construction. Company management claims that workers prefer to live like this: ‘Many employees have opted not to invest their resources in formal housing and have chosen to live in informal housing. This has precipitated the emergence of a backroom informal economy, which brings with it a host of negative socioeconomic issues, not least of which is a rapidly growing community without basic services and infrastructure’ (Lonmin, 2014).
The mineworkers themselves tell a different story:
Who wants to live in a shack? [...I]t’s cold in the winter, it is hot in the summer. This is not a good condition where a person can stay. This is our home because we spend a lot of our time here. We don’t get enough money to build proper homes where we are coming from either. The money we get here is not even enough for us to stay in these shacks where we are living, for our basic needs here (Seidman and Bonase, 2015:38).
One result of this is very few wives and children from far-off rural areas join the workers at the mines. These women remain in the LSA; they still subsidise the miner’s wage by subsistence farming and traditional women’s work, they still provide social reproductive labour, and they remain ignored and unseen in this new democratic dispensation.
The ‘two households’ myth
Mine management attribute both migrant labour and the gendered structure of work at the mines to the workers’ traditional, patriarchal culture. Companies assert that mineworkers prefer to maintain a wife ‘at home’ in the LSAs, then move in with a second woman living near the mine (portrayed as a girlfriend or nyatsi, or perhaps a polygamous second wife). Management argue that supporting two households drives mineworkers’ demands for higher wages. One paper written in 2013 states:
The migrant labour system led to the development of ‘second families’ in which migrant workers establish local households with second wives or girlfriends in the shanties around the mines. This has been encouraged by the abolition of the single sex hostels and paid for by ‘living-out allowances’– a cash allowance to ‘live out’, that is to exit the migrant hostel system [...]. This socio-economic condition of mineworkers supporting a second family on or near the mine while at the same time needing to visit his rural home has led to demands for higher wages (Gwatidzo and Benhura, 2013).
Mineworkers reject this with anger: ‘This is an insult to us and our families. We love our wives, we would like to see them coming and staying with them, the amount of money we are earning does not allow for that. Who would bring their loved ones to live under these conditions where there is no water, no electricity, no schooling facilities for the children?’ (Seidman and Bonase, 2015:62).
This myth has disastrous consequences for women who live near the mines. Women who remain in LSAs are labelled legitimate wives; women who live near the mines are stigmatised as ‘town women’, prostitutes or girlfriends who cannot be seen as workers’ helpmates or family and thus get no benefits from the employer. In reality, women’s lives are fluid in this changing environment: a woman from the LSAs may move to the mines as a mineworker herself or as a worker’s wife, while a woman living near the mine may develop a long-term relationship and have a family with a migrant worker.
Destroying local communities in mining areas
We also find a third ‘category’ of women: women defined as ‘local’ (or even ‘indigenous’) whose ancestors lived in areas where the mines are located today. Since the 1960s, platinum mining has caused massive disruption and destruction of nearby established ‘traditional’ or ‘tribal’ communities. Today, 20 years into a democratic South Africa, these communities face relocation to make way for mine development. One research group in Bojanalo in 2015 demanded that government end forced relocation without negotiation with residents and provide adequate alternative residence for those dislocated (Seidman and Bonase, 2015:65).
Gavin Capp points out (see the interview in this book) that platinum mining developed in the 1960s mostly in or near areas designated as homelands. Where commercial farmers owned the land (i.e. land owned by white farmers), platinum companies bought mineral rights from farm owners and black farm labourers were summarily expelled. Where mineral deposits occurred on land falling under so-called ‘tribal authorities’ (designated Bantustans or homelands), the companies dealt with the apartheid minister of native affairs on behalf of chiefs. Post-1994, the government confirmed that traditional authorities continue to govern ‘communal lands’; mines now deal directly with these ‘tribal authorities’.
More recently, platinum mines have provided shares in the mine company to the tribal authority’s investment arm instead of paying royalties to the tribal authorities for use of mineral rights. These direct equity arrangements are likely to further remove the community from the tribal authority’s decisions around use of communal land.
Local communities displaced by mine operations often start shack settlements on land no authority has claimed. Immigrant mineworkers then rent rooms and shacks there, straining infrastructure (water supplies, roads, sanitation and schools). Overcrowding, pollution and overuse of scarce resources lead to destruction of the land itself. The dislocation of communities through deals between mines and tribal authorities has led people to challenge whether tribal authorities represent the local population. Displaced communities point out that these chiefs were often confirmed in power by settler and colonial powers and then by the apartheid state (Seidman and Bonase, 2015:41).4
More questions arise when tribal authorities are viewed through a gendered lens. When colonial and apartheid authorities appointed tribal authorities, they also entrenched patriarchy.5 Under these tribal authorities women had no rights over land where the women lived and farmed. Women could not rule, except as regents for male children. Women could not speak for themselves in the tribal political space. When the post-apartheid South African government confirmed the powers of tribal authorities, they confirmed what has been called ‘toxic hyper-patriarchy’ (Suttner, 2017). Gender activists argue this has no place in South Africa’s democratic constitution.6
Arrangements between mines and tribal authorities also provide for corporate social responsibility programmes that promote employment and economic welfare for local communities affected by the mines. These include Social Labour Plans (SLPs) legally required by the Mining Charter and MPRDA. But local communities displaced by the mines rarely benefit from SLPs. They receive no alternative homes or employment. Land and water are polluted. Mines fail to provide decent houses for their own workers; they do not provide replacement houses for those moved off their land.
Lonmin has repeatedly failed to implement SLPs. In 2014 Lonmin agreed to spend over R201 million (13.5 million euro) on SLP projects to provide ‘for 126,000 people living in the greater Lonmin community’ (Kotze, 2017; Krause, 2015). In September 2017, community members took to the streets over lack of service delivery as projects failed to materialise (IOL, 2017).
Women have no say in deals between mines and tribal authorities, but the impact of these decisions on women’s lives is stark. The mine controls scarce water resources, and exhausts and pollutes existing ground water while local residents (in practice, women) are barred from accessing water and land they previously used for daily survival.7
Women displaced from traditional communities who move into informal settlements often lose what little status they had. If and when these women develop relationships and have children with immigrant workers, they give up any position in the clan. As a result, neither these women nor their children benefit from mine social responsibility projects set up by tribal authorities in the clan’s name.
Gender segregation in the workforce
In the last two decades, government has legislated to include women in mining, in the Mine Health and Safety Act (1996), the MPRDA (2002) and the Broad-Based Socio-Economic Empowerment Charter (the Mining Charter of 2002). The Mining Charter sets a 10 per cent target for women mineworkers and ties this target to the renewal of mine operating licences. Currently, in the country’s platinum mines 11.5 per cent of the workforce is female (Botha and Cronjé, 2015:10-37; Botha, 2013; Chamber of Mines, 2017:27).
But while mines now allow women to work underground, their inclusion remains tenuous. Nominally, women work ‘as equals’ in the mines but in reality women’s daily experiences at work, especially underground, are marked by exclusion. Women remain on the fringes of the mining labour market. One of the reasons for their peripheral status has to do with the 10 per cent quota set by the Mining Charter. At best mines have viewed the 10 per cent target as a maximum percentage for hiring women, an end goal; at worst it is treated as tokenism.
Men in mining and those in power at times remark that men are employed because they are competent to do mine work, but women are incompetent tokens of transformation. Some say that ‘women’s bodies are weak and cannot do mine work’ or that ‘doing mine work will render them sterile’ or ‘their bodies will collapse if they continuously physically exert them’ as mine work demands. Adding to these pseudoscientific reasons rooted in protectionist discourse, some say that ‘women are only included because the government insists on including them’ (Benya, 2012c; Benya, 2008).
As a result of these beliefs that men in the mines still hold, some occupations such as rock drilling remain exclusively reserved for men, even though women have been in mining for more than 13 years. Men, both in management and at training centres, insist that women’s bodies are not suitable for holding and continuously operating drilling machines (Benya, 2012b).
Instead of viewing women as legitimate mineworkers who add value to teams and the mines, women are seen as an inconvenience or non-core helpers brought in to appease the government. Their bodies are viewed as illegitimate and weak for mining, and relegated to the margins. At the training centre, women are not allowed to take classes that are considered masculine or perceived to require strength. In cases where some ‘compulsory’ practical session requires physical exertion, male instructors insist that women observe instead of partake in practical training. Instructors suggest that women act as assistants, holding down the rope, passing material or carrying equipment, while men do the actual physical work. These gendered differences at the practical sessions mean that by the end of the training most men, even those who struggled significantly at the beginning, perform better than most women. As a consequence of these gender ideologies and the protectionist discourse which reinforce female fragility, the mine workforce remains segregated by gender, with most women in entry-level and low-paying jobs (Benya, 2017:509-522).
When women are assigned to core mining jobs such as winch or locomotive operation, their team members usually informally reallocate the work. While a woman might be hired as a winch operator, in reality she is reallocated to tasks such as bringing material, painting walls, fixing pipes, cleaning drains or fetching water for her team. Other women work as pikininis (also known as assistants) for their shift supervisors, carrying bags and doing administrative work and sometimes personal tasks for them. The pikinini is an occupation that has no formal status; in recent years it has been increasingly done by women.
Reallocation of jobs and tasks means that women are alienated from their work and isolated from their teams. In other words, the gender segregation of the mining workforce continues unabated, albeit within the mines, invisible from the public’s and the government’s view: literally and figuratively ‘underground’. Since women are often far removed from their teams they hardly learn skills on the job and hardly build strong friendships with their co-workers, important elements that strengthen solidarity in the dangerous underground world. The isolation from teams and alienation from work mean there is hardly any transfer of skills to women.
These informal job reallocations come at a heavy price. Not only do women not learn mining skills, but they also take home substantially less than their male colleagues. By not doing core mining activities they are not paid production bonuses earned by male co-workers who do core mine work. Thus, work reallocation reinforces the idea that women cannot do mine work and deprives them of extra production income that male workers get. The ‘tokenistic and objectifying inclusion’ of women in mining is ‘as disempowering as complete exclusion’ (Crenshaw, 1993).
In addition, studies confirm that sexual harassment and violence against women working at Lonmin and other platinum mines are ‘common and pervasive’. ‘Sexual harassment was reported to have occurred in the cages that transport employees to mining areas, as well as during transit, and in ablution facilities. Individual women who were working on their own had also reported instances of harassment’ (McKay, 2017). After the rape and murder of mineworker Pinky Mosiane while working underground at Anglo Plats’ Khomanani mine in 2012, the Department of Mineral Resources issued a directive saying that women workers should not be made to work in isolation underground; however, cases of rape and murder underground continue (IndustriAll Union, 2017).
After reaching the 10 per cent quota for women, mines do very little to attract and retain more women and nothing at all to transform mining culture to build inclusivity and gender equity. Instead, mines continue to mobilise masculinity to achieve production targets, to the exclusion of women who refuse to embrace masculinity and ‘masculine’ ways of working and being at work.
There is also a race dimension to employing women. Underground jobs are filled by black women; white women are only found above ground. White women who form part of the above-ground workforce mainly hold positions with administrative powers (Pretorius, 2016). These positions pay more and have better benefits: when a woman who works in these jobs is sick she can go to a doctor of her choice rather than the mine hospital. As well as holding positions of power, white women also have social capital, sometimes through their husbands who worked as supervisors or support managers in the mines. Other vestiges of the apartheid workplace order continue in the post-apartheid era: white women are seen as fragile and not capable of manual work, while black women are viewed as ‘labouring bodies’ (Benya, 2016). Black women are scraping the bottom of the mining barrel. They enter the workforce as second-class citizens and a good source of cheap labour.
In all of this, unions are complicit with mine management. Unions refuse to recognise that workplace struggles are not gender-neutral; workplace struggles also must be viewed through a gender-sensitive lens. The union ‘boys’ club’ tends to focus on so-called ‘real workplace’ (masculine) issues and then signs agreements with employers that fortify women’s subjugation.
Take for instance housing and accommodation policy. This policy, designed long before women entered the mines, was renegotiated and tweaked when women entered the mines to include a clause that women should not be housed in single-sex hostels. Mining officials say this was added because mines and unions did not want to ‘separate women from their families’, thereby destabilising families. Union officials argue that they ‘did not want to reproduce the apartheid migrant labour system’. This policy reproduces old ideologies about women being first obligated to their families and not the workplace sphere, embedding gender stereotypes of women as both ultimate homemakers and outsiders in mining (Benya, 2013). It reinforces the gendered attitudes that lead to women’s removal from certain teams and their exclusion from ‘masculine’ occupations.
The continued gender-segregated workforce at mines is a consequence of the ‘masculine design’ of mines, not an unavoidable natural phenomenon. While post-apartheid legislation allows women to work in the mines, their inclusion remains uncertain and the mechanisms used continue to emphasise female domesticity. Numerical changes have been accompanied by very little transformation of gender relations, biases and gender order. Women remain outsiders, systematically and strategically marginalised by the masculine mining order and occupational mining culture.
Very few of the 11.5 per cent of women mineworkers come from communities where the mines are located. In today’s tweaked migrant labour system, few mines around the Platinum Belt hire local women, preferring male workers who have worked in mining before. Even women working on the mines are likely to come from traditional LSAs. Thus, women who hope to find jobs in mines operating near their villages are disappointed.
In a country with an unemployment rate of 26.6 per cent where over 30 million people (out of 55.9 million) live below the poverty line, with 58.6 per cent females living in poverty compared to 54.9 per cent males, hiring males over females condemns women to continued poverty and reproduces gender inequality in mining towns. This in turn reinforces the stereotyping and categorisation of women in mining communities (Benya, 2015c).
Women from mining communities report that if they want jobs in the mines they have to bribe officials. One woman remarked, ‘Jobs are for sale, if you don’t have money you don’t get a job.’ Getting a job in the mines costs between R1,800 and R3,000 (120–200 euro) with those hired by labour brokers paying the higher prices (Benya, 2015a:277). Also, bribing mine or union officials for a job is not only financial but in kind. A masiza (human resource officer) and a number of women report that sometimes to get a job, ‘women have to sleep with the men from the mines’.
Women from communities around the mines (whether born locally or immigrant) who do not work in the mines do not qualify for benefits and services provided to mineworkers. Even as women in rural areas still struggle to support families of mineworkers without water, roads or good schools, women who live near the mines also perform unrecognised and underpaid labour to support mineworkers. In informal settlements around the Platinum Belt women wake up early every day to collect bathing and drinking water and cook food so that mineworkers can get ready to go to work. Water taps are often kilometres away from miners’ housing in informal settlements; women go out to search, queue for water and return home before workers can prepare for their morning shifts. If women are late fetching water the worker is late for work and the mine’s daily production suffers (Benya, 2015a:287). Since the mine’s morning shift starts at 5 a.m., these women cannot sleep in.
This work defines women’s days and depletes women’s energies. ‘Women’s work’ for male mineworkers is defined by the mines and contributes to productivity at the mines. Yet women do this hard work without pay for their labour or recognition from the mines.
The mines go further, labelling these women as prostitutes and girlfriends of mineworkers, an outcome of the ‘two households’ myth. This stereotype from apartheid days states that women living in mining communities survive through illegal, precarious means, selling liquor and sex. These ‘loose’ and ‘undesirable’ women are seen as posing a threat to the productivity, health and morality of male mineworkers.
This causes massive damage to women who live near the mines. The mine companies refuse to provide town women and their children with access to services or benefits, which are supposed to go to mineworker families. Mine clinics often refuse to treat town women when they are sick or in emergencies. Shortly after the Marikana massacre, when four women were shot and injured by the state police while going to a meeting to support the strikers, the mine clinic refused to treat the wounded women (Benya, 2015a:284).
But like their sisters in the LSAs, town women play an integral role in the social reproduction of labour at the mines. Their hard labour on a daily basis underpins profits of the platinum industry, but these women are also treated as an inconvenience, invisible and unpaid. These women confront a daily reality where mines dig precious minerals from rock literally below their homes but refuse to build decent houses and paved roads for their use.
The local government authorities add a range of excuses to the reasons the mines give for failing to support communities near the mines. They justify refusing to provide basic services such as sanitation or clinics or clean water because the community residents do not belong to the right tribal group, they vote for the ‘wrong party’ (not the ANC but the Economic Freedom Fighters) or they are unemployed (often adding that these women are sex workers and girlfriends).
The companies’ stigmatising and disadvantaging of ‘town women’ stirs up divisions between these women and country wives, as well as dividing both these groups from women who are still part of the traditional community. Emphasising ‘differences’ between these groups of women, and refusing to provide services to them based on this stereotyping, systematically reinforces ethnic tensions between groups of women and throughout mining communities (Benya, 2015b).
Lonmin as case study: After the massacre
One of the most striking examples of how gender exploitation continues in post-apartheid platinum mining comes in the treatment of women after Lonmin’s Marikana massacre in 2012. After the massacre, Lonmin and government would only recognise the claims of wives and family who had been registered with mine authorities as beneficiaries. This excluded women whom the company called ‘town women’ and ‘second households’ in Marikana, forcing a gap between grieving communities and isolating family members from LSAs who came to Marikana after the massacre.
When women living in informal settlements in Marikana organised themselves under Sikhala Sonke to protest against the massacre and Lonmin’s treatment of mine communities, Lonmin further demonised these women. Lonmin’s rejection has become more strident since Sikhala Sonke brought a case of neglect and lack of accountability by Lonmin before the compliance adviser of the International Finance Corporation, the World Bank investment body overseeing social responsibility for private sector transnationals in developing countries (see the chapter by Patrick Bond).
For the women from LSAs that Lonmin sees as ‘legitimate’ widows, Lonmin still denies responsibility for the massacre and refuses to pay compensation. Then, just before the Farlam Commission announced its results, Lonmin offered limited assistance to the families of those killed (Seidman and Bonase, 2015:76).
Lonmin management proposed that the widows themselves or another family member should get a job working at Lonmin to replace the income of the killed breadwinner. Over the last 15 years mines have offered jobs to family members of workers who died at the mines (most often through mine accidents) to ‘assist’ the family for the loss of income. Replacing the deceased mineworker by a family member, often their own children, highlights the biological reproductive work that women do for the mines. When the mines extended job offers to the widows, they further boasted that this would address the gender injustices of previous years.
The widows of the massacre see this not as a remedy but as further entrenching the exploitation of the family in the LSAs – now on offer to women as well as men. This ‘solution’ neither allows them to take control of their lives nor addresses inherited gender inequalities. Rather, the jobs widows were offered at the mine entrenched existing power relationships between management, mineworkers and their families, and indeed cemented the migrant labour system in its new shape. The widows themselves argue that this ‘solution’ causes more damage, pushing them into living situations that they would not choose if they had any other way to support their families.
Since the massacre these women desperately need incomes. Asked what they wished for the future, the widows said they wanted to get money and skills so that they could stay in their home areas and earn a living (most often by running a small business). Several hoped to finish building the house that they and their husbands had planned. The widows saw Lonmin’s offer of work as a ‘quick fix’ that would provide a cheap solution for Lonmin instead of paying compensation for killing their husbands.
Lonmin further offered to provide education for the children of mineworkers killed in the massacre (but only children of those registered as wives in the company books). The company offered to send children over the age of five to boarding schools. This would give the children a better education than that available in their home areas while enabling their mothers to work in the mines without having to bring their children with them to their new jobs.
The widows realise that Lonmin’s offer to send their children to boarding school fails to respond to the demand that the mines should take responsibility for educating all children of mineworkers, alive and dead, in LSAs and mine communities. But when the widows asked Lonmin to upgrade schools in LSAs rather than take their children away to school, the company responded that this would be far too expensive as the orphaned children come from many different areas.
Lonmin CEO Ben Magara boasts about this, pointing out: ‘While we can never replace their loved ones‚ we have offered employment opportunities to their families and every child of school going age is a beneficiary of the 1608 Education Trust. This is in addition to the statutory payouts from pension and life funds (RDM News Wire, 2015).
The widows commented at the BASF shareholders’ meeting in 2016:
Lonmin tells me that this job is a kind offer so that I can earn the money that my husband worked for in their mines, so that I can feed my children. But for me, going to work at Lonmin was a hard choice because I had no other way to feed my children. They do not even pay me today the living wage of R12,500 that our husbands died for, three years ago. Today they take my hard work, and pay me this small amount, and say I should be grateful to them. This is not compensation, it is more exploitation, and revictimisation: from slave to slavery.
Lonmin is proud that they have sent my children, and the children of some of the other widows, to boarding school. We say that education for our children is something we want and need, but it is not easy that our children must be away from us. We, the widows say, ‘They killed our husbands. They have taken our children away to boarding school. We cannot stay with our families, when we are working in Marikana. Our houses are closed now. We do not have homes any more.’
Since 2016, 32 women in this group work at Lonmin, 22 employed as surface workers and 10 as mineworkers underground. (Where a woman goes to work depends upon her physical fitness.) The widows say they took jobs in the mines in desperation, to support families and children. This is not the reparation that they sought. Moreover, offering mine jobs to these widows further divides workers along gender, urban-rural, and ethnic lines.
When the widows started work in Marikana, the women discovered that Lonmin had retrenched newly hired (male) workers to ‘open up’ jobs for the women. These retrenched workers stood outside the mine gates, hoping for work, openly hostile to the widows who took their jobs. One widow commented: ‘Our husbands did not fight and die so that we could take another worker’s job. They wanted a better life for all workers, not this’ (Seidman and Bonase, 2015:33).
In 2016, presenting their case and Lonmin’s treatment at BASF’s annual general meeting in Mannheim, BASF refused to support their demands (see the chapter by Maren Grimm and Jakob Krameritsch).
Towards justice for women in South Africa’s platinum mines
Thus, while the apartheid laws have been repealed and new laws aim to redress past gender imbalances, on the ground very little has changed. Despite the shifting character of the industry in post-apartheid society, the platinum mines still treat the hard labour done by women as invisible, marginalised and unpaid. The mines still systematically externalise social reproduction labour costs to groups of women and reap the profits. Mines are still primarily male spaces, recycling myths that reinforce ethnic and gender hierarchies. The continuity of gender disparities between apartheid and post-apartheid platinum mining are glaring, adapting gender inequality and oppression to new shapes and colours but leaving the fundamental exploitation in place.
In effect, women continue to be the invisible pillars of mining, the hidden shock absorbers of the mining industry. The mines maintain established exploitative gendered work structures because they bring in profits. And no one, in South Africa or globally, seems ready to hold the mining industry to account for this. Until such a time that these issues are systematically recognised and until we demand that companies pay back the fruits of women’s labour, we can expect that the marginalisation of women, and the impoverishment of our society, will continue.
But we also see that the cracks are widening. Even now women are rising. Resistance is inevitable if the system does not adopt fairer and less exploitative ways of extracting the minerals. As we saw in Marikana in 2012, people are demanding change. There is no turning back.
Asijiki!!!
1 See http://international-institute.de/en/general-assembly-generalversammlung-assemblee-generale-2/
2 When deaths on South African mines increased by 27 per cent in the first three months of 2011, researchers blamed the poor safety and health record of subcontractors. See www.iol.co.za/business.../rising-sa-mine-deaths-need-urgent-attention-1055349.
3 See also www.mail.businesstimesafrica.net/index.php/engineering/item/1445-south-africa-four-years-after-marikana-massacre,-british-mining-company-fails-to-improve-squalid-housing-conditions-for-workers.
4 Some also question whether ‘tribal authorities’ qualify as ‘indigenous peoples’ in the international framework adopted by the UN. Although the Bapo Ba Mogale website claims it first formed a political structure in a previous century, mine companies and transnationals such as BASF claim that chiefs represent ‘indigenous’ populations. Bojanala residents recently challenged tribal authorities in court, claiming that the Boer Republic in the 1880s forced their families to give up privately owned land to Bafokeng chiefs. Not all people born and raised in Bojanala are Tswana clan members. Migrant workers came to work on white-owned farms; some remained there. As traditional chiefs do not recognise these people as clan members, they have no rights in the clan.
5 There is ongoing debate about whether patriarchy was inherent in precolonial societies or brought in by the colonialist authorities. A literature review can be found at politicaleconomicandsocialissues. blogspot.com/2007/09/african-women-under-pre-colonial.html.
6 The ANC December 2017 conference passed a resolution to curb the powers of tribal authorities over land (www.heraldlive.co.za/news/2017/12/22/chiefs-bite-back-land-move/). It remains unclear how this will be taken forward in government.
7 Newspapers carry stories about violent community protests over water shortages in the Madibeng area (near Lonmin’s Marikana) from 2014 (www.mg.co.za/article/2014-01-21-brits-residents-to-march-over-continued-water-shortages) and near Brits from 2015 (www.mg.co.za/article/2015-03-19-more-to-brits-protests-than-meets-the-eye).
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Drinking water being transported in the village of Ncgobo in the Eastern Cape, South Africa’s largest labour sending area.
