Winter Park, Florida 08/10/2015 - Codelco said that workers at its Radomiro Tomic mine in Chile have rejected a new collective agreement offer and voted in favour of a strike that started today.
Codelco has activated a contingency plan which aims at continuing operation and guaranteeing the safety of those employee who choose to keep working. To this point, operations have not been affected, the statement said.
Radomiro Tomic is Codelco's third largest mine with annual output of around 370,000 tonnes.
Codelco acknowledges that the strike is legal, adding that its improved offer had take into account the current difficult market conditions.
Three-month copper on the London Metal Exchange is currently trading at just $5,156 per tonne, down 24 percent year-to-date.
Codelco is currently going through a belt tightening phase. In late September, it announced plans to reduce the number of executives on its payroll by 15.6 percent as it seeks to “optimise the performance of the company” in response to low copper prices. The layoffs, effective November 1, will take its executive team to 255 people from the current 302.
(Additional reporting by Perrine Faye)