With a strike at Escondida, the world’s largest copper mine, in its second week, striker morale remains high as they have no doubt as to the merits and eventual success of their claims. While the union and company management inch towards a new three-year collective contract, they do at least agree on one thing: that Escondida workers are the best in Chile. That cuts little ice in Antofagasta, the hub of Chile’s copper industry, a divided city in which there is a large dose of envy rather than sympathy for the miners’ above average salaries and generous bonuses, as Paul Harris reports from Antofagasta.
An encampment of tents housing an estimated 1,200 striking miners nestles in the grounds of Escondida’s sports complex, a baton round away from the company’s stylish copper coloured office block on the outskirts of Antofagasta that police are protecting. The encampment appears more like an army base than a picket line with workers camped together by section: haul truck drivers, oxide plant operators, sulphide plant operators, with discipline maintained by union officials. Far from sitting around, teams of miners have been active in the community cleaning beaches and painting a mural that is a homage to Escondida and the importance of copper mining to Chile. “We do these activities to keep occupied, maintain order and to keep attentive,” said hydraulic shovel operator Luis Valdes.
The camp demonstrates a high level of preparation, organization, discipline and solidarity amongst the strikers and an intention to hold out for what they want. “We began saving for four months to provide a kitty of 300,000 pesos per worker to fund the action,” says truck mechanic Danilo Noriega. “We are committed to the cause,” said Karla Zuelta, one of 11 women that work at the mine driving the massive 240-tonne haul trucks.
This is perhaps the best organized and well prepared strike in Chile’s history, a testament to the preparations undertaken in consultation with Law Investment Commerce Consult (LICC), a consulting team that includes lawyers, economists and finance experts that has helped the FMC union gets its finances in order and draft a collective contract proposal based on an economic analysis of Escondida and its owners BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto.
Chile’s unions have entered the modern age. “The union needs to fix its line of negotiation and argue it well from a solid base and based upon a long-term economic analysis, so we contracted a commercial advisor. This is an innovation, we have to modernize,” says union secretary Pedro Marin.
Escondida executives are unsurprised. "Escondida is a very professional company and we have the best professionals in Chile. They are very well prepared people and so it is no surprise that they are well organised in asking for what they want as they are the best," said Escondida corporate manager Pedro Correa.
The strikers are proud of their role in making Escondida the best mine in the world, but they want to share in that success. “When the copper price was at 76 cents a pound we pulled in our belts as the company asked us to with the austerity measures but now that the price is high the company says that it has to take care for the future so we are never going to share in this business,” says assistant controller Eduardo Diaz. “Escondida is a world force. If the copper price is in the clouds, we deserve to share it. We are only asking for 1 percent of the profits,” says mechanic Bernado Lobos.
The union claims that just 1 percent of Escondida’s profits – some $2.9 billion for the first half year – would be enough to meet its pay claim, which it lowered August 16 from an initial 13 percent rise to 10 percent to move towards an agreement. That is the profit on three days production. “They talk of the great family of Escondida but I do not feel like a child of this company at the moment. We are not important as human beings to them but we are a fundamental piece of this business, but a piece that is replaceable,” said one worker who did not want to reveal his name for fear of company reprisals.
Workers carry a card outlining the company’s core values that is signed by company president Bert Nacken that includes relations of mutual benefit that “create value for all parties” and that are based on relations of mutual respect that includes “open communication, the disposition to share”.
“The company’s attitude to our claim shows that this is worthless,” the workers said.
The miners attribute this to a change in senior management when Diego Hernandez became president of BHP Billiton’s base metals division and moved the regional headquarters to Chilean capital Santiago a couple of years ago. Chile, like other South American countries, still suffers from colonial-era class divides between the educated caudillos that executives tend to be drawn from and the mass of the working population, which is amplified by managers keen to provide the results demanded by their international pay masters. “When the company arrived [in Chile the American management] was very good to us. The change of administration to Chilean managers was a problem, from Diego Hernandez down,” says Diaz.
The union maintains that it is defending the rights of the country to benefit from its copper rather and sees increasing workers pay as one of the roads to achieve that. If miners earn more, money will filter through the economy and enable pay rises to be realised for other jobs. “How can Chile develop if they do not raise wages?” asks Noriega, pointing to a message written in large white letters on the hill overlooking the Escondida offices that strikers installed during the first days of the strike: ‘the copper is ours to the death’.
Adriana Ramirez who makes crab pies at the Jacques Cousteau sea food shack at Coloso in the shadow of Escondida’s concentrate load out terminal agrees with the miners. “I think it is good what they are asking for, for all of Chile,” she says.
Workers earn between 300,000 and 800,000 pesos a month before bonuses and are claiming a 10 percent pay rise and bonus package of about $30,000, which has generated little support amongst Antofagasta’s non-miner population, and has divided the city, according to taxi driver Joan La Fuente. “People think that they are crying like the child that does not want the toy it is offered,” he says. My father works at Escondida and we argue about this. Many people are envious because work at Escondida is well paid. Antofagasta is expensive but with 800,000 pesos a month you can live well,” he said.
Miners maintain that is just reward for the negative aspects of working 12-hour shifts at over 3,000 metres above sea level away from their families in a copper mine. “At that altitude the work conditions are very difficult and many people suffer from arterial hypertension,” says Lobos, something the company vigorously denies.
More galling for the miners is the disruption of shift patterns to their families and that contributes towards an estimated 40-50 percent of marriages failing, according to the union. “You miss everything. Birthdays, holidays, Christmas and Easter. Once every three years I get to spend Christmas with my family,” said Lobos. “No marriages last till people are 70. We all die alone and the men die first,” says Diaz.
Unlike many of their peers, mother of four Faviloa Sepulveda and her husband have held their marriage together through the 15 years he has worked at Escondida, but she has first hand experience of the risks miners run. “My father worked in the mines and he had a heart attack when he was 53. My husband is 44 and I don’t want him to have one. [Miners] get a lot of depression working 12-hour shifts at altitude. [My husband and I] talk about leaving the city as [Antofagasta] is not kind to the miners but we have four kids and the money is there in the mine,” she says.
Faviloa says that the miners’ wives will continue supporting the union and their husbands until they have a satisfactory solution. That may not be as soon as the copper market would like given that the union has a multimillion dollar war chest. “I cannot say how much we have but it is several million dollars, which is enough to maintain the strike until the end of August,” Marin said.
The outcome of the Escondida collective contract will set the tone for other contract negotiations later this year at state copper company Codelco’s Andina and Codelco Norte divisions. It will also raise the bar for Chile’s other private mining companies, whose executives privately fear the outcome both from the likelihood that they will have to pay their workers more and the possibility that they will lose personnel to Escondida.
ENDS
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