World Copper Announces Brassie Creek Claim Package Expanded by 1,473 Hectares to 3,335 Hectares - The Globe and Mail

The tentative deal followed last-minute talks after earlier negotiations failed. (Image: Screenshot from TRT World | YouTube) BHP (ASX, LON: BHP) and the supervisors’ union at its Escondida mine in Chile have approved a preliminary agreement reached on Wednesday morning to avert a strike at the world’s largest copper operation.

A union at the massive Escondida copper mine in Chile is heading into the final day of mediated wage talks after operator BHP Group (ASX: BHP) improved its offer, just as striking workers at an Antofagasta Plc mine return to the negotiating table. Near-record copper prices are emboldening workers to seek a greater share of mining profits as companies look to contain cost inflation, fueling labor tensions in the top producing country. At the same time, the threat of further disruptions is adding to supply concerns that have helped drive the metal’s rally.

Escondida in northern Chile, the world's largest copper mine [Photo: BHP]Two of the largest copper operations in the world are now paralyzed by strike action, as the class struggle erupts in the sector that is the lifeblood of the Chilean economy. At the Centinela mine, a large open-pit copper and gold mining complex controlled by the Luksic family’s Antofagasta Minerals, 709 workers from the Esperanza mine and Centinela district unions have been on strike since October 7. At the Escondida mine, the world’s largest copper mine, operated by the Anglo-Australian giant BHP, the 1,020-member Union No. 2 of Supervisors and Staff has announced a strike for Wednesday, October 14, after 94.8 percent of its members rejected the company’s final offer. These strikes are a sharp expression of a crisis that is convulsing the entire Chilean mining industry, a crisis of falling production, rising prices, mounting deaths, and a working class that is beginning to move against the corporatist union apparatus that has policed it for four decades. On Sunday, another serious accident at Codelco’s El Teniente Division claimed the lives of two workers from the contractor Aura Ingeniería S. A.