Miners and Placer Dome officials meet to discuss community concerns and examine possible solutions.

Massive lay-offs in the South African mining sector have taken a severe toll on mine workers' communities, removing tens of millions of Rand per month from local economies. The migrant nature of the mining labour supply is such that the lay-offs had an impact over an area 800 km wide by 2,500 km long, affecting communities from central Mozambique to Botswana, Lesotho and the Eastern Cape. These areas, already extremely impoverished, have also been devastated by HIV/AIDS.

The conventional practice in South Africa has been to provide a small cash severance with the lay-off, plus a 3-month training period. Few employees could take advantage of such training and counselling, as it requires they stay at the mine-site, rather than return to their villages. Looking to provide a more effective, beneficial, and sustainable program to support laid-off employees, the Placer Dome Western Areas Joint Venture (PDWAJV) developed the Care Project, designed to help laid-off workers or their proxies become economically active. An additional project purpose was to support mineworkers and communities in coping with HIV/AIDS.

A unique feature of the project was that the laid-off worker had the option of nominating a 'proxy' from their immediate or extended family. In this way, Care Project beneficiaries were not limited to the original male worker - who for various reasons (i.e., age, HIV/AIDS) may have been unable to benefit from the program - but to any member of the community designated by the worker. Project sponsors hoped that women, in particular, would benefit from this aspect.

South Deep Care Project was launched in late 1999 to provide skills training, enterprise development support, micro financing and counseling to workers and their families.

Placer Dome developed a palliative care program for those suffering with AIDS and, in partnership with a South African service agency, it ensured that the terminally ill were properly cared for in their homes. In its first two years, the AIDS home-based care project supported nearly 2,200 families and trained over 400 village care supporters. Back at its mine site, the company required all employees to participate in HIV/AIDS education workshops. It distributed free condoms. It offered voluntary testing and counselling to all employees (mandatory AIDS testing is illegal in South Africa). It provided anti-retroviral drugs to those with the infection. And it started moving its miners out of hostels and into family living centers.

CIDA's Industrial Cooperation Program contributed $2,000,000 to the $5 million project in recognition of its innovative approach to the engagement of government, the private sector, and civil society in dynamic partnerships addressing development issues. In 2002, Placer Dome and its local partner, The Employment Bureau of Africa (TEBA), were awarded the World Bank's prestigious Development Marketplace Innovation Award for the home based care project -- the first time a private-sector social responsibility project had done so.

The Care Project ended in December 2003 after virtually all the laid-off miners had been contacted and over 60% of them had registered for retraining under the project.  Of those who registered, 56 percent were still making at least $100 per month in October 2003 – well above the subsistence-level wages common in the rural areas where they lived. 

Many of the activities spawned by the Care project continue at the South Deep mine and the project has had an impact on other mining interests in South Africa as well. As Kgosietsile Mogaki, social plan director for the South African Ministry of Minerals and Energy puts it, “ Today [the government sees] the Care Project as an example that we encourage other mines to follow. The Care Project has changed the social face of the South African mining industry.”

In January 2006, Placer Dome was acquired by Barrick Gold of Toronto.