24 April, 2011
While basking in world admiration following the successful rescue of 33 workers from inside the San José copper mine, Chile President Sebastián Piñera announced on October 18, 2010, on BBC’s HARDtalk, to a global television audience, that his country would ratify ILO Convention 176 and reform a disjointed national mine safety programme “within 90 days.”
It turned out to be a lie.
Near that 90-day mark in mid-January, ICEM President Senzeni Zokwana and General Secretary Manfred Warda met with senior government officials in Santiago and were told there is nothing on the agenda to reform internal safety standards or to adopt global standards. And, indeed, since there has been no movement inside Chile for reform, except from the trade union federations there who are now working hand-in-hand with the ICEM.
In February, the ICEM organized a three-prong campaign to pressure Piñera to fulfil his promise. Over 4,000 messages were delivered by ICEM affiliates and our friends in the labour movement! The Piñera government is being forced to answer embarrassing questions about why his government has so far reneged on a promise made in the celebratory aftermath of the San José rescue.
The ICEM continues to be optimistic that the Chilean government will remember how important reality is; that the country is only one mining accident away from losing the good-will and technical credibility it won by marshalling a rescue of historic dimensions.
And the Piñera government must face another reality: if it is world-class in any way, it is as a world-class producer of minerals, especially copper, and that means it must develop and implement world-class safe mining practices. So far it hasn’t.
San José Mine Rescue
In the days just preceding Piñera’s brash HARDtalk declaration, the President fell back on a culture dating to the Pinochet regime. In the commission he set up to investigate San José, no trade union representatives were invited to sit on it. ILO Convention 176, the Safety and Health in Mines Convention, states that workers and their trade unions shall participate in mine inspections and accident investigations.
At San José, Union No. 2 of Campañia Minera San Esteban repeatedly warned of safety hazards and once even presented a legal challenge to close the mine. But the common refrain from both government and industry when unions warn on safety and health conditions is that the union’s duty is to negotiate economics, not to take part in safety or health matters.
After a miner was killed in 2007, San José was shut for a brief period by SERNAGEOMIN, the National Service of Geology and Mining. But it quickly reopened on orders from another government official who failed to read the closure report, and relied on the owner’s pledge that deficiencies would be corrected.
One such pledge was to install a ladder through a ventilation shaft as a second exit, a standard in Convention 176. That was not done, there were no follow-up inspections, and the lack of a second exit, in fact, led to the 69-day entrapment of the 33 miners.
SERNAGEOMIN is not a health and safety inspectorate. It plays that role, but so do bureaus inside six Chilean ministries. Chile has overlapping safety agencies inside the six that cover all sectors of work. None of them have judicial powers to enforce the few regulations there are in mining and all are without the technical capabilities to inspect and prevent accidents before they happen.
In short, all prerequisites of Convention 176 are missing in Chile: regular inspections, set procedures to report and investigate dangerous occurrences and accidents, trade union consultation, regulatory bodies with the authority to shut dangerous mines, the right to refuse unsafe work, workers’ ability to select their own safety representatives, and employer obligations to provide training. Convention 176 places responsibility on employers to not only remove workplace hazards, but to remove the causes of those hazards.
Despite the Chilean government’s “head-in-the-sand” approach to mine safety now that the cameras and microphones so prominent at San José have disappeared, the ICEM will continue to press Piñera alongside a renewed coalition we have developed with the mineworkers’ federations of the country.