Anglo American Platinum’s (Amplats) record performance with zero fatalities in 2019 was no accident. It came from the culmination of an intense focus on changing the mindset of the company’s workforce and rigorous discipline.
The achievement was all the more remarkable for the year in which the performance was achieved. The number of deaths at SA’s platinum mines in 2019 surpassed those of the country’s gold mines for the first time.
Fatalities on platinum mines increased to 20 from 12 in 2018. Gold mines accounted for 18 deaths, compared with 40 the year before.
The pride was tangible when Amplats executives delivered the company’s best annual financial results in February, marking the surprise end of the seven-year tenure at the helm of Chris Griffith, a highly regarded CEO.
The world’s second-largest source of mined platinum group metals (PGMs) and Anglo American’s 80% held subsidiary employs more than 27,000 people, including 3,600 contractors who fall under the company’s intense drive to make its mines safe.
“The achievement of zero fatalities for the first time ever is an incredible outcome that we as an organisation are immensely proud of,” says Gordon Smith, executive head technical, safety and sustainability at Amplats.
“We have progressively put in engineering solutions through removing the risk by doing work differently or having different technologies to ultimately eliminate hazards,” he says.
“But people make choices. So, this journey of ours is about influencing the choices people make at work and day-to-day lives. It’s hinged on the concept of ‘zero mindsets’, that zero is possible, zero harm, working safely without hurting anyone.
“To get to zero harm you can create technology and processes to get there, but you need people who want to get there. It comes from a willingness of people to believe in it and to get there.”
There’s a realism in Smith’s approach to safety, which relies so heavily on human behaviour and interactions despite the policies, procedures, training and technology that a company deploys to keep its employees safe.
“I’m equally anxious. We’re on a journey of making this sustainable. Just because we’ve had one year where we’ve not fatally injured anybody that doesn’t guarantee that we won’t do it in the future,” he said. “To make it sustainable we need continuous introspection that comes from learning from incidents.”
Mine safe haven
There’s a perception among some SA executives that the drive to safety at mines is complicated by the country’s social circumstances. The mining workforce is essentially drawn from poor communities where law and order is poor.
For miners coming to work, they experience the generally reckless nature of public transport in the form of minibus taxis and other drivers, making it tough for the employee to switch mindset from that freewheeling environment to one that is highly regulated and demands strict adherence to rules and regulations.
At Impala Platinum (Implats), the social environment outside the mine fence makes safety on the mines a challenge, says CEO of the Rustenburg operations Mark Munroe, pointing out employees come from a high-risk environment to a safer one at work despite the inherent risk of mining underground.
By contrast, at Implats’s new Il de Lac underground mine in Canada, the workforce feels they are moving from a low-risk environment to a more dangerous one and keep an absolute focus on safety.
“Implats’s death toll on the roads is far more than underground, for example. Our challenge is that our employees actually relax when they get to work. We have to keep everyone really focused on safety,” Munroe says of the 40,000 work force.
Over the past five years, Amplats has implemented a programme to make its employees aware of choices they make at work, personal lives and societies to “allow the values, leadership and engagement behaviours to move outside the mine fence”, says Smith. “It’s much bigger than the organisation.”
Many companies adopt a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to the violation of safety rules, which Amplats defines as “simple, non-negotiable standards”.
Anglo shares safety lessons throughout the group and these are disseminated to the workforce.
Union involvement
Sibanye-Stillwater CEO Neal Froneman stresses that companies alone cannot make mines safe. After a terrible first half of 2018 at its gold mines, when 24 people were killed, it notched up 17 months without fatalities. “This is an unparalleled achievement in the history of our gold operations and in underground deep-level mining,” says Froneman.
However, at its platinum mines, six people died during 2019, doubling from the year before.
Froneman’s point remains that it needs close co-operation of the mine health and safety officials from the department of mineral resources & energy as well as the participation of organised labour to cut deaths and injuries.
On some mines discipline for safety violations was made tricky by the strength of the unions. In some cases unions have made it difficult to enforce sanctions on their members, while race also plays a part, with white managers apprehensive of disciplining black employees.
“Managers are scared to take action and tell someone they’re going to lose their job for a serious safety violation. We feel we can’t enforce our discipline properly and there’s no consequence management,” says Munroe.
“You have to empower the manager, mine captain or shift boss to stand up and do their job. It’s not that difficult. The guys actually respond well to discipline because ultimately they realise it’s for the good of everyone.”
Amplats set up a bimonthly meeting of a committee comprising management, departmental representatives and the leadership of all organised labour to reduce the complexities of union intervention on safety violations.
“It’s been a very constructive initiative that has changed a lot of that kind of behaviour. We created a forum for real issues to be put on the table. Once a quarter this committee does a site visit, splits into groups and does a walkabout, engaging the workforce in different places to ascertain the efficacy of our safety strategy,” Smith says.
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