Pact In The News
State of the sector: Worker health, safety and equality in ASM
Mining.com's Amanda Stutt takes a deep-dive into the 2020 State of the Artisanal and Small Scale Mining (ASM) Sector report by Pact and the World Bank that higlighted working conditions, health, safety and gender equality challenges in the industry that employs more than 44 million people worldwide.
For Pact's James McQuilken, the report's co-author, a goal was demonstrating global policy frameworks to improve key areas of the sector.
“I think one of the biggest key findings is occupational health and safety — the data shows, from a really novel analysis trying to compare times and frequency rates — what we’re saying in there is that rates were similar in 1999 in ASM, and about the same as they were in the 70s and 80s in many of the larger built mines,” McQuilken told MINING.COM.
“The questions were, how did large-scale mining get to improve and how did it become unacceptable in society? In the US, it was coal miners not coming home after work because it was so dangerous,” McQuilken said.