The Mine Health and Safety Act 29 of 1996 governs mines instead of the Occupational Health and Safety Act. It puts the duty for a safe mine on the employer, sets out when employees must be trained, and requires a written record of every formal training intervention.
Mines, mining areas and works. This is the statute that takes over where the general workplace law stops: section 1(3)(a) of the Occupational Health and Safety Act 85 of 1993 expressly carves mines out of that Act, and the Mine Health and Safety Act covers them instead.
The boundary is worth drawing carefully, because it runs through a lot of businesses rather than between them. A contractor with crews on a mine and a workshop in town is working under this Act at one address and the OHS Act at the other, with different appointment thresholds on each.
| Section | What it requires |
|---|---|
| Section 2 | The employer must ensure, as far as reasonably practicable, that the mine is designed, constructed and equipped to provide conditions for safe operation and a healthy working environment, and that it is commissioned, operated, maintained and decommissioned so employees can work without endangering health and safety. |
| Section 3 | The employer must appoint one or more managers with the prescribed qualifications for day-to-day management. Section 4 allows other functions to be entrusted to appointed persons, with notice to the Chief Inspector. |
| Section 5 | The employer must provide and maintain a working environment that is safe and without risk to the health of employees, and must consider risks to people who are not employees but are directly affected by the mine. |
| Section 10 | The employer must provide the information, instruction, training or supervision employees need to perform their work safely, and make sure they are familiar with the hazards of that work and the measures that control them. |
| Section 11 | The employer must identify hazards, assess and record the significant risks, make the records available to employees, and determine control measures after consulting the health and safety committee. |
Of all the duties in the Act, section 10 is the one that converts directly into courses booked. It does not simply say “train your people”. It says when.
That last point is the one mines most often get caught on. An operator certified on one machine class is not certified on the next one because they moved teams.
Section 10(4) requires the employer to keep a record of all formal training provided in respect of each employee. Not a register of who attended, in general — a record per employee.
In practice that means an inspector, a client or your own audit can ask for one named person’s training history and expect it to be produced. Certificates sitting in a lever-arch file in a site office do not survive that test well, which is why employers increasingly want certificates they can pull up and verify rather than photocopy.
Section 11 sits alongside section 10 and drives what you train on. The employer must identify hazards, assess the risks, record the significant ones and make those records available to employees, then determine control measures after consulting the health and safety committee, and review them periodically.
It also sets the clock on investigations: an accident, a serious illness or a health-threatening occurrence must be investigated within 10 days of the event, with the investigation completed within 30 days.
The numbers here are different from the general workplace, so do not carry over what you know from the OHS Act.
| Threshold | What is required |
|---|---|
| 20 or more employees | Section 25(1): a health and safety representative for each shift at each designated working place. Note that this is per shift and per working place, not one per mine. |
| 100 or more employees | Section 25(2): one or more health and safety committees. |
Sections 28 to 30 deal with the qualifications of representatives, how they are elected and what powers they have. Sections 33 to 36 cover how committees are established and what they may do.
The Act creates its own standards body. Section 41(3) establishes the Mine Qualifications Authority, which generates education and training standards for the mining industry, seeks their registration and accreditation under the South African Qualifications Authority Act, monitors achievement against them, and performs sector education and training authority functions under the Skills Development Act of 1998.
The practical consequence for an employer is simple: when you book training for a mine, ask which body accredited the provider and check that the certificate names it. A certificate that names no accrediting body is difficult to put in front of an inspector.
Tell us the roles and machine classes on your operation and we will map them to the courses and the retraining intervals. We train at your site anywhere in South Africa, or at our Mokopane centre.
Training for employers| What the Act asks for | Where it comes from | The course |
|---|---|---|
| Operators competent on the specific machine class they run, retrained when they move | Sections 10 and 11 | Earth moving machinery and lifting machinery |
| Elected representatives able to inspect and report | Sections 25 and 28 to 30 | SHE Representative |
| People able to respond to injury on site | Sections 2 and 5 | First aid courses |
| People able to respond to fire | Sections 2 and 5 | Fire fighting courses |
| Fall protection where people work at height | Sections 5 and 11 | Working at Heights |
| Rigging and slinging done by trained people | Sections 5 and 11 | Rigging skills |
No. Section 1(3)(a) of the Occupational Health and Safety Act 85 of 1993 excludes a mine, a mining area and works from that Act, and the Mine Health and Safety Act 29 of 1996 applies instead. If your business also runs premises that are not part of the mine, those premises fall under the OHS Act, so you can be working under both statutes at the same time in different places.
The Act does not fix a universal interval. Section 10 requires training before an employee starts work, at intervals the employer determines after consulting the health and safety committee, before a change in procedure, and before a change in occupation. So the interval is yours to set and defend, but the three event-driven triggers are not optional.
Section 10(4) requires a record of all formal training provided in respect of each employee. That is per person rather than per course, so the test is whether you can produce one named employee’s full training history on request.
Under section 25(1), a mine with 20 or more employees must have a representative for each shift at each designated working place — so the number follows your shift pattern and layout, not just your headcount. A mine with 100 or more employees must also have one or more health and safety committees under section 25(2).
Treat it as no. Section 10 requires training before a change in occupation, and competence on one machine class is not competence on another. Moving an operator from, say, a front-end loader to an articulated dump truck is a new training event, not an internal transfer.
