It is no secret that our national safety and health record in the mining sector has been a far from exemplary one. The primary problem at this time being the failure of workplace safety and health regimes to sensibly weigh the balance between observing the operating rules in the respective industries and what they perceive to be the costs and trouble associated with adherence thereto. Needless to say the available evidence points to the gold mining sector as being the chief culprit in this regard.
But that is not all. Our national safety and health oversight institutions and mechanisms have long lacked both the will and the capacity for effective enforcement. Frankly, there exists a built-in propensity at the level of those institutions to simply look the other way when confronted with workplace safety infractions. There are reports of persons who consider themselves to have been victims of workplace safety and health infractions who simply refuse to engage the state-run occupational safety and health authorities on account of what they allege is a deep-seated official indifference to their particular claims.
The culture of a low level of sensitivity to workplace safety and health has manifested itself mostly in two ways. First, there is usually that brief after-the-fact but pointless bemoaning of such tragedy as derives from workplace incidents which, all too quickly downscales into an ‘as you were’ posture. Then there are these Safety and Health Seminars which often pay elaborate attention to what the manuals have to say but are rarely, if ever, rigidly applied on the ground after the seminars are over and done with. All of these, in the opinion of many, add up to employers being perfectly prepared to take the risks associated with safety and health delinquency primarily because the bottom line, mostly in terms of cost, usually trumps the risk of accident, injury and/or loss of life, at least from their perspective. It has to be said as well that this perspective derives considerable comfort from the fact that the Occupational Safety and Health Department’s track record in offering workplace inspection and a penalty-driven regime for safety and health infractions has long been a standing joke.
The historic lack of any disciplined official determination to rigidly enforce safety and health rules at the workplace (there are, of course, logistical and resource-related considerations as well, particularly as it pertains to mining operations in the non-coastal regions) is no secret. We have more or less followed a ‘policy’ of benign indifference to infractions until as was mentioned earlier, tragedy strikes, so that it has become a matter of weakness at the levels of both the workplace and at the state agency substantively responsible for effective enforcement. There have been, as well, claims of corrupt practices linked to a tendency by official enforcers to look the other way.
This week’s disclosure that Chinese workers attached to Guyana Manganese Inc (GMI) fell ill after working in tunnels at Matthews Ridge follows a distressingly familiar pattern. It is, as it has been historically, a matter of moving to close the doors after the horses have bolted – a failure to grasp the point regarding the nexus between not enforcing the rules and the likelihood of tragedy. There will, presumably, be an investigation though whether that probe will tell the story clearly and candidly (indeed, whether it will be undertaken within a reasonable time frame in the first place) and whether it will result in the implementation of measures that will result in a decisive proverbial turning of the corner is frankly, doubtful. The reality is that safety and health probes in Guyana have an uncanny knack of extending themselves forever then eventually metamorphosing into silence. It is, one can argue, a propensity that derives from the aforementioned historic institutional indifference to workplace safety and health.
We can gauge this much from the safety and health status quo at coastal workplaces, including some state agencies, where transgressions of clearly laid-down rules in relation to fire and dangerous chemicals abound and where a harshly inhospitable working environment in downtown commercial establishments has persisted for years without any serious management response of attention by the state. If the national disposition on workplace safety and health were to require summing up in a slogan, this editorial’s choice would be “Talking the Talk but Lacking the Stamina to Walk the Walk.”
One makes this point, of course, having regard to the aforementioned long-standing limitations of the Occupational Health and Safety Department, a circumstance that is reflected, chiefly, in the fact of its powerlessness to impact on safety and health transgressions and the attendant loss of life in the gold mining sector.
There have as well, been reports of serious safety and health infractions at the Russian-run Bauxite Company of Guyana Inc (BCGI) and here the question arises as to whether the partial stake – albeit a decidedly modest one – which the Government of Guyana has in BCGI does not place it under some kind of obligation to continually monitor the safety and health circumstances of the company’s operations to ensure that these are compliant with the rules that apply in the sector and the laws of the country as a whole.
To return to the issue of the Chinese miners at GMI some critical questions arise. The first one has to do with whether or not the company ought not to have been aware of the safety and health protocols associated with the operation that they were pursuing. The second one has to do with whether, irrespective of whether or not they were aware, our own Occupational Safety and Health Department ought not to have gone over those safety protocols with them in order to ensure that they were not overlooked in the operating phase. Thirdly, there is the question as to whether or not there exists any official oversight arrangement that ought to have provided some indication to the local authorities that the Chinese miners were in breach of the safety regulations and whether such reporting ought to have compelled corrective action.
Our experience of the Russians at BCGI would have taught us that foreign investment can sometimes be a double-edged sword. Frequently, it seems that when such investments involve jobs and revenue for the receiving country and when the investors are known to come from developed countries, the foreign bosses interpret that to mean that they can do pretty much as they please without fear of sanction. One doubts, for example, that either the excesses of the RUSAL managers at BCGI or the Chinese mining manganese at Matthews Ridge would have occurred in countries where the playing field is more level, so to speak.
As is customary in these situations it very much appears that once again, it has taken tragedy to realise disclosure. In the future, we can of course only hope that the Matthews Ridge tragedy will galvanise the authorities into the kind of action that has not been taken in the past. The loss of life is regrettable but it opens up an opportunity for embracing and effectively implementing a more responsible national safety and health culture and even if precedent does not fill us with abounding optimism, we must hope that this time around there will be a swift, comprehensive and candid report that will lead, logically, to appropriate and implementable recommendations that will require the authorities to take their occupational safety and health responsibilities far more seriously than they appear to do at this time.
