Aside from being a shareholder in AU companies, I am the step father of a (24 year old) person who died suddenly and unexpectedly. I urge all on HC to be very mindful of the depth of grief that the deceased mine worker’s family are now consumed by. It is not an experience that I wish upon anyone! I do not own shares in MML. Nor do I have any salient facts to add as to how this tragedy came about.
What I can say from personal experience is that entities effected by such a death take an often unwarranted self-interested view of the circumstances surrounding the death of someone they have, by the measure of their employ, a duty of care towards. Perhaps MML management is different?
Certainly, from what some posters have described, MML ticks all the boxes when it comes to the looking after the welfare of the community from which it draws its workers. Still I am puzzled by two aspects of this worker’s death. The idea that a company can so swiftly categorise ‘fault’ as “gross negligence” on the part of the worker without describing how such a value laden label was arrived at for a worker who cannot now defend his actions.
I am also troubled by MML’s seemingly lack of concern for how such a steadfast assessment will affect his (or her) living co-workers. And of course, the community in which this deceased person lived.
Perhaps, and this is probably an unfair observation based on my own up and close experience of ‘legal minds’ at work, the public release of ‘fault’ as “gross negligence” on the part of the worker is meant to reassure Australian/Western investors? That the worker’s death, in the context of the day to day operations of the mine, will have little effect upon MML’s share price.
Clearly from some of the (thankfully minor) posters the value of the worker’s death seems to be measured as some perverse opportunity to buy more shares.
I on the other hand reflect on what is known. And wonder how different circumstances might have been had the two deaths (this year) occurred within the legal domain of Australian law? I ask if an inquest was held into the death of this worker or the previous worker who died while in the employ of MML? Perhaps the law does not require such a sophisticated Western concept in the Philippines. And thus MML is fully and legally entitled to adjudge the dead worker as its investigation sees fit.
The question that remains, for me, is the moral question of responsibility. I hope with a sense of unremitting sincerity that MML learns from this worker’s death and at least financially looks after the welfare of the dead man’s family.
Some might think I am being too morally opinionated. Since I have never worked in a mining environment. Well I have worked in heavy industrial environments where a false limb movement was often one step away from severe injury or death (i.e. oil refinery, wood chipping port loading facility, utility 66KV substation, and food-grade glass manufacture). The one thing I learnt from such potentially dangerous environments, is that the culture of safety is the responsibility of all. It protects the highly skilled and highly experienced worker and it protects the young apprentice and the novice. It also protects the company. How so? Well, trust is slow to build in strength and endurance but mighty quick to disappear when tragedy strikes. I worked on a site where two workers died. Even now 48 plus years later I remember the detail of that fateful afternoon. Nowadays as an employer, I realise that one incidental consequence of those two work place deaths (and which has stayed with me in my efforts to be a good employer) is that productivity slumped because of those men’s untimely deaths. Perhaps that is a real consequence all companies, big or small, need to consider when dealing with a sudden and unexpected death and mitigate against when determining the quality of their Job Safety Assessments.
MML Price at posting:
99.0¢ Sentiment: None Disclosure: Not Held
