ABSTRACT
Fatalities, accidents and safety at work are underlying conditions of the life and work of colliers in all coalfields. The chapter compares these conditions in two sets of chronologically overlapping oral testimonies from the Ruhr coalfield in Germany and the Witbank coalfield in South Africa. What did the miners share in terms of accidents, accident prevention and safety? And how did they reflect these conditions in their stories? The authors argue that the similarities are suggestive of a shared experience between colliers worldwide and over time. The contrasts, however, illustrate how strongly safety at work was shaped by state legislation, coalmining companies, unions and workers’ representatives – and developed at different speeds. Safety discourses on the Ruhr were exercised in the context of a developed society and in South Africa embedded in a developing society, marked by disempowering racialised and ethnic heterogeneity. They only took off in the period after unionisation in the mid-1980s, when the voices of disenfranchised South African colliery workers assumed a different, stronger tone. By that time miners on the Ruhr could look back on nearly 40 years of co-determination and an even longer history of improved accident prevention.
