Blood Gold | TakePart Blog Network

Blood Gold

Katie Halper November 28, 2007 | 7:05 am EST

By Katie Halper France isn’t the only country that knows how to get its strike on. Tuesday, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) of South Africa, announced that 240,000 miners are planning a nation-wide one day strike for December 4, which will be the country’s first industry-wide mining strike. Gold, platinum, and coal miners are protesting over little things like poor working conditions, rockfalls, poisonous gas explosions, flooding and earthquakes, which killed 200 miners last year and already killed 186 this year. A South African commission explained the relationship between mining safety (or lack thereof) and gold: each ton of gold produced in South Africa costs one life and 12 serious injuries.