The value of life on South Africa’s gold mines

From The New York Times:

Last year, South Africa produced only 11.1 percent of the world’s gold, and China nudged ahead of it.Nevertheless, mining still accounts for nearly 7 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product and is a vital source of jobs in a country where unemployment is estimated at nearly 40 percent … The value of the extracted gold is measured in currency, but of course there is a human toll as well — fatalities that, while declining, continue to be appalling enough that Parliament has been considering a measure this week that threatens company executives with prison time for deaths within their mines.

A 1995 national commission estimated that 69,000 mineworkers were killed in South Africa between 1900 and 1993, with 25 times that many seriously injured, the vast majority digging for gold. That does not count the untold numbers felled by lung diseases owing to the contaminated air — or those rendered deaf by the bone-jolting noise. The rate of mining fatalities compares “unfavorably with most other countries in the world,” the commission concluded. Since then, safety measures have reduced the annual number of deaths to about 220 from an average of 742. This is post-apartheid South Africa, and the welfare of miners — nearly all of them black — is a matter of more scrupulous concern.