(Businessweek) — Toto Willie has little to show for a decade’s work in Anglo American’s gold mines: a store selling potato chips and kerosene, run from one of the three rooms in his tin shack, and a 1985 Toyota station wagon. Willie’s wife, Nowest, looks after a neighbor’s two babies to supplement the few hundred rand the family earns monthly from their store. Willie also has a medical certificate showing he has silicosis, a scarring of the lungs caused by prolonged exposure to the silica dust released by some kinds of gold mining. Willie and others with the disease worked in South African mines now run by such companies as Gold Fields (GFI), Harmony Gold Mining (HMY), and AngloGold Ashanti (AU), a spinoff of Anglo American. “It’s hard to breathe,” Willie, 50, says at his home in Happy Valley, a trash-strewn shantytown near Cape Town, as he pulls the certificate from a worn folder. “I can’t manage to work again. I need help.”
