IRIN Focus on mine retrenchments

More than 900 workers from the newly privatised Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines (ZCCM) will be retrenched between now and the end of this year, further worsening unemployment in the Copperbelt region, according to reports by the mining giant Anglo American. Konkola and Nchanga The Anglo subsidiary Konkola Copper Mines (KCM), the new owners of about 70 percent of ZCCM mines, plans to reduce its workforce at the Konkola and Nchanga mines to about 9,462 by the end of the year from the current 10,379. Konkola employed a total of about 3,438 workers in its underground mines and concentrator plant at the beginning of this year when KCM bought the mines from state-owned ZCCM. The Anglo reports said Konkola, which produces 56,598 mt of copper in ore and 50,500 mt of copper in concentrate per annum, will employ only 2,972 workers by the end of this year. In Nchanga, which had a total workforce of 6,941 in January, about 450 workers will lose their jobs at the end of this year. Nchanga’s operations include an open pit mine, an underground mine, a concentrator, a tailings leach plant as well as a tailings dam. According to Anglo, at the end of March 1999, the Nchanga pit produced 181,110 mt of copper per annum, the underground mines yielded 13,603 mt, the concentrator processed 97,792 mt of copper and 10,052 mt of cobalt while the tailings leach plant produced 60,120 mt of copper per annum. The 293 workers employed at Nampundwe pyrite mine will not immediately lose their jobs. However, the operations, which include an underground mine concentrator and produces 65,000 mt of pyrite concentrate, will cease at the end of 2007, added the reports, rendering all the current employees redundant. Little hope for unemployed The Anglo documents said these pending retrenchments are a continuation of a process already set in motion by ZCCM, which had been shedding jobs at the rate of about 1,000 workers per annum since 1995. ZCCM, which in 1995 had accumulated a debt of about US $800 million from its loss-making operations, was looking to attract buyers of the mines and to improve productivity. Officials of the Mineworkers Union of Zambia (MUZ) told IRIN that there is very little hope that retrenched workers will find alternative employment in the depressed Copperbelt. “Once a worker is retrenched from the copper mines, it is the end of the road,” an MUZ official said, adding that the situation has caused deep anxiety among workers. According to Anglo about 30 percent of Zambia’s population is directly dependent on mining activities. This number includes copper mines employees and their dependants. However, with privatisation, Anglo believes that expectations among unemployed Zambians will increase that new job opportunities will be created. These hopes are likely to be frustrated, and according to the company, might lead to conflicts on the Copperbelt among communities looking to win job benefits from the new owners, heightening tensions between the employed and unemployed. Zambia’s copper industry has seen its production drop from a peak of 720,000 mt per annum in 1969 to 340,000 mt per annum in 1996. Analysts attribute the decline to outdated machinery, a lack of capital injection by ZCCM as well as a fall in world copper prices in the late 1970s and 1980s. Copper accounted for 10 percent of Zambia’s GDP in 1996, while 80 percent of the country’s export earnings came from the mines.