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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold Price Monitor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: goldsnow who wrote (39068)	8/16/1999 6:43:00 AM
From: Rarebird	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 116898

Labor disputes unsettle Canadian mining industry By Paul Simao TORONTO, Aug 15 (Reuters) - A series of strikes, lockouts and tense labor disputes have helped turn 1999 into the "year of living dangerously" for Canadian mining companies and their unionized workforces. Thousands of Canadian miners, from the gold camps of northern Ontario to the copper pits of central British Columbia, put aside their picks and shovels this summer to rumble with some of Canada's most powerful corporate citizens. Workers at the high-cost Con gold mine in Yellowknife, a frontier town in Canada's remote Northwest Territories, learned a painful lesson in economics over the past year as a "short" strike turned into a year-long shutdown. The strike, prompted in part by Miramar Mining Corp.'s demand for a 10-15 percent wage cut, coincided with a dramatic fall in the price of gold to $270 an ounce, about $60 an ounce below Con's pre-strike cost of production. Those workers who stuck around long enough to see the end of the strike this summer returned to work a little leaner but still better off than their 100 or so colleagues at the Red Lake gold mine in northwestern Ontario. Workers at Red Lake, owned by Canadian miner Goldcorp Inc. , have been on strike since June 23, 1996. Their future did not become any clearer this summer when Goldcorp Chairman Robert McEwen told shareholders at the company's annual meeting that it was "conceivable production could start without a settlement," next summer. The Red Lake strike began when gold was trading around $390 an ounce. Gold traded at $260.40 an ounce on Friday. marketwatch.newsalert.com