Chinese imported to build steel mill in Brazil. Thyssen wanted 4.000. Brazil set for 600.
CSA, a 5 million tonnes a year steel slabs joint venture between CVRD and ThyssenKrupp, is due to start-up in March 2009. It will receive 5.9 million tonnes of iron ore and 2.7 million tonnes of pellets annually from CVRD
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Rio industries agree to hire Chinese workers
The Federation of Rio de Janeiro's Industries (Firjan) has agreed to allow a subsidiary of Germany's ThyssenKrupp to hire 600 Chinese workers in the construction work of a coke plant, it said on Wednesday.
Firjan's President Eduardo Eugenio Gouvea Vieira described the measure as necessary from the entrepreneur's point of view, to cut investment costs.
The company CSA, a joint venture of ThyssenKrupp, initially planned to bring in 4,000 workers from China to build the plant in an industrial district close to the city of Rio de Janeiro. But the Brazilian Ministry of Labor only authorized 600.
Explaining Firjan's stand on the decision by ThyssenKrupp, Vieira said: "We are sorry, but we understand that the entrepreneur has his strategy to make investments at a lower cost to be more competitive."
Firjan's deputy chief Carlos Mariani Bittencourt added that the phenomenon is not new in Brazil, as the company in charge of building a petrochemical spot in the south of the country hired Chinese people around 30 years ago.
Vieira promised that Chinese workers would leave the local job market within one and a half years
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Those railroads in North America were built by the Chinese and even today, more than 100 years later, the Chinese work force in unbeatable.
I saw once, during construction, a photo of the Eurotunnel -that white elephant between France and the UK across the English Channel - and there were lots of Asian guys among the construction crew. I guess they build half of that loss making pharaonic project. |
