CANADA / WORLD

South African miners issue
International support appeal

LONDON — The London
office of the South African Con-
gress of Trade Unions has issued
an urgent appeal for funds to sup-
port striking mine workers.

More than 300,000 miners,
members of the National Union of
Mineworkers, shut down the
country’s coal and gold mines
when they walked off the job on
August 7.

“The apartheid regime is de-
termined to bleed the trade unions
to death — the international trade
union movement must not let this
happen’, urged SACTU co-
ordinator Zola Zembe in a telex to
the organization’s regional
offices.

The miners are receiving no
strike pay since strike funds are
illegal in South Africa. Social
security for Blacks is non-existent
and subsistence wages exclude
savings. The situation could
quickly become desperate. The
Chamber of Mines has stated it
would starve the miners back to
work. The regime has vowed to
crush the union, which as the
largest affiliate of labour central
COSATU, is known as the “‘iron
fist’? of the South African labour
movement.

Regime Desperate

But the regime may soon be
feeling desperate itself. Coal and
gold accounted for 70 per cent of
apartheid’s export earnings last
year, a vital figure for an economy

which is scrambling for foreign
exchange. The strike has closed
52 mines and the refinery which
processes gold bars is running out
of stockpiles.

The transnational corporations
and banks who control the coun-
try’s extensive mineral deposits
are also feeling the pinch, losing
approximately $50-million a day.

Cyril Ramaphosa, general sec-
retary of the NUM, called the
strike “the big one”’ and urged the
widest possible support, includ-
ing a general strike if necessary.
Indeed the strike is the biggest in-
dustrial dispute in the country’s
labour history.

“If we win this strike it is going
to be a significant motivation for
all other workers to continue
with their own struggle fora living
wage’’. Ramaphosa promised.

Black miners earn $210 a
month, (one third of the wages
paid to their white counterparts),
working under some of the most
dangerous conditions in the
world. The mines, some more
than three kilometres deep, are

regular scenes of disaster. Last
year 800 miners died in accidents.

Mine labour is supplied to the
transnationals through apar-
theid’s migrant labour system.
which forces workers to live in
hostels thousands of miles away
from their families. iz

Despite statements by man-
power minister Du: Plessis that
“the dispute is strictly one be-
tween the employers and work-
ers’’, over 70 strikers have been
arrested, while on the eve of the
strike, two powerful bombs de-
stroyed the national offices of
COSATU.

Firms such as the Anglo-
American Company have hired
their own private police force. At
the corporation's Harmoney
mine, 32,00 miners were forced
underground at gunpoint.

“‘We have received informa-
tion that those who went under-
ground are staging a sit-in,”
Ramaphosa told a Johannesburg
press conference last week.

Miners Told to Leave
Ina change of strategy from the

Cheques should be made Pay-
able to the: NUM(SA) Strike
Fund Appeal and sent to:
Peter Heathfield
General Secretary

_ Support the NUM

National Union of Miners
St James

Vicar Lane

Sheffield England

$12 Ex

h

Cyril Ramaphosa (r) general secretary of NUM and James Mahlatsi,
president of NUM, at a press conference in South Africa.

last strike, when police and com-
pany security squads murdered
picketing NUM members, the
union has asked the miners, most
of whom come from neighbouring
states or the so-called homelands,
to return to their homes for the
duration of the dispute. ~

“This is unprecedented, but
the union is doing it with the view
to saving lives”’, said Ramaphosa.

The miners are demanding im-
proved pay and working condi-
tions, 30 days annual paid leave
and the right to live with their
families.

It was the NUM which waged a
battle last year to remove the last
vestiges of apartheid’s colour bar

in industry which prohibited
Blacks from holding supervisory
or technical positions. Despite the
legislation, the union reports the
companies have obstructed all at-
tempts by African miners to gain
access to better qualified jobs.

The SACTU statement appeals
to all Black miners to join in the
strike. White miners, it says,
“*have reached a critical point to
preserve the colour bar . . . white
miners must now make up their
minds either to join hands with
felllow Black miners against the
boss class or suffer the same fate
as the apartheid system, which is
bound to be uprooted and dis-
carded’.

one

—————

Study reveals abnormal pregnancy threat

VDT-birth defect link
‘a non-issue’ says ministry

By KERRY McCUAIG

TORONTO — A new Swedish
study which establishes a definite
link between birth defects and the
use of video display terminals by
pregnant operators has been dis-
missed by an Ontario Ministry of
Labour spokesperson as **a non-
issue’’.

The study, whose findings were
released by the Swedish Uni-
versity of Agriculture and Science

‘in June, were made public in

North America through the ef-

forts of the health and safety co-

ordinator for the Ontario Public
Service Employees Union.

Sponsored by the Swedish
government, the study found a
two-fold increase in fetal death
and abnormalities in pregnant
mice exposed to the same low
level electro-magnetic field as
emanates from computer video
display terminals.

It replicates research done by
Stockholm’s Krolonsta Institute,
which after finding a four to five-
fold increase in fetal mal-
formations among exposed ani-

mals, concluded that VDTs pose.

a risk to pregnant women.
Interestingly the Karolonsta
findings, released in January
1986, were greeted with much
fanfare and controversy. By con-

trast the media has ignored the
latest study. The only press
coverage to date in all of North
America has been an article in a
small trade journal.

“It’s a pretty half-assed re-
sponse, which stems from their
vested interest’’, says OPSEU’s
Bob DeMatteo. ‘‘The Publisher’s
Association has adamantly denied
there is any problem, a particular
Irony given the fact that the To-
ronto Star had one of the most
infamous cases of an adverse pre-
gnancy cluster back in 1980.”
Only the Canadian Broadcast-
ing Corporation in Ontario has
carried the item on its morning
news program. It was during an
Ontario Morning interview that
Dr. Anthony Moots, of the Minis-
try of Labour’s Non-ionizing
Radiation Protection Centre, cal-
led the Swedish findings ‘‘an ab-
solute non-issue’’.

Both the federal and Ontario
governments sent its represent-
atives to Sweden last year for an
international conference examin-
ing the health effects of VDTs,
but decided to dismiss the in-
stitute’s findings.

‘*Not only have the federal and
all the provincial government’s
failed to enact legislation requir-
ing protection for VDT operators,
they have refused to fund or take

part in any research into the prob-
lem’’, says DeMatteo, an ack-
nowledged expert in the field of
VDT safety and author of the
recently published, Terminal
Shock.

However he does note some
cracks in the armour of denials
which have surrounded govern-
ment-employed scientists. Dr.
Maria Stuckley, of the radiation
branch of the Department of Na-
tional Health and Welfare, mod-
ified her position in light of the
Swedish research and is now ad-
vising operators to sit at least one
metre away from their terminals.

““Stuckley had maintained,
along with Moots, that there is
absolutely no biological risks
from a weak electro-magnetic
energy field. She has since
changed her tune’’, DeMatteo
notes.

The Swedish studies are of par-
ticular interest since they are the
first to use the exact type of radia-
tion as produced by VDTs. Other
international studies, which have
produced conflicting results, have
been based on surveys of popula-
tion sectors who have been ex-
posed to low level radiation.

DeMatteo himself conducted a
study of 145 female VDT users at
the provincial health ministry in
Hamilton. The results found ab-

normal pregnancies occurred
twice as frequently for VDT
operators, compared to non-
operators.

An estimated 65 per cent of the
workforce, or 1.5 million Cana-
dians work with VDTs. It would
not be a major undertaking to
safeguard their, and their chil-
dren’s, health. The terminals can
be shielded to eliminate emissions
and some manufacturers do pro-
duce emission-free machines. As

Bob DeMatteo
reports fighting a
press blackout in
order to get the
news out.

part of its legislation, the Swedish
government will only purchase
shielded equipment.

““VDTs can be made safe’,
says DeMatteo. ‘‘The military
shields all of their VDTs to pro-
tect their sensitive information. I
guarantee that every VDT in the
Pentagon and in every military
installation in the world is
shielded. If this protection can be
provided to protect information,
certainly some precautions can be
provided for operators”’.

HAMILTON — August 6 to
9 were proclaimed Hiro-
shima-Nagasaki Remembr-
ance Days in the Steel City.
Mayor Robert Morrow opened
the event at a commemorative
ceremony organized by the
Quakers and Mennonites and
other church groups on the
steps of city hall. The mayor
presented the proclamation at
8:15 a.m., the same time as a
U.S. plane dropped the first
atomic bomb on the Japanese
city of Hiroshima, 42 years ago
on August 6, 1945.

A second rally in Gore Park
was addressed by Lea Nor-
grove of Physicians for the
Prevention of Nuclear War
and author Victoria Brandon.
Both had recently returned
from the World Congress of
Women held in Moscow.

About 50 people braved a
pouring rain for an ecumenical
service, August 9, which was
timed to coincide with the
destruction of Nagasaki.

All three events were organ-
ized by the Hamilton Dis-
armament Coalition as part of
an annual commemoration.

In addition to the
commemoration events in
Hamilton, other peace events
took place across Canada. In
Toronto 300 took part in a
Hiroshima vigil organized by
ACT for Disarmament while
the Toronto Disarmament
Network sponsored a talk by
Karen Goodfellow.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE, AUGUST 26, 1987 e 5