Commission of inquiry to investigate the development of a comprehensive labour market policy

In 1985, the Central Statistical Services and the Chamber of Mines ceased publishing a racial breakdown of mining industry employment. This marked the end of a statistical series that dated back for almost 100 years. Since 1985, there is no official series of racially segmented data for the mining industry, while the racial breakdown of employment in all other sectors of the economy was published up until 1992. From 1993, the Central Statistical Services introduced a new “Unspecified Race” category into its published employment data, making the identification of trends in employment and income by race less certain. The statistical information on racial issues in this submission must reflect these difficulties with the data. In respect of gold and coal mines that are members of the Chamber of Mines, the Chamber periodically has made available unpublished information on employment and total wages after 1985, grouped into “skilled employees” and “unskilled / semi-skilled employees.” Until about 1989, when legal barriers to the employment of blacks in skilled jobs were removed, the two Chamber categories reflect the old “White” and “Non-White” categories used by the Chamber before 1986. Since 1989, a small, but slowly increasing number, of skilled workers have been black, but this has not been taken into account in any of the statistics presented for the gold and the coal sectors. “Black” employment in the gold and coal mining industry thus refers to employees in Categories 1 to 8, the only groups for which the NUM currently bargains with Chamber member mines