Vale Inco to restart Voisey’s Bay despite strike

Vale Inco Newfoundland and Labrador plans to train non-unionized supervisors and mill workers to work in the Voisey’s Bay open pit nickel mine after contract talks with striking miners broke down.

The Vale Inco (VALE-N) mine has been idle since last August when 250 members of the United Steelworkers walked off the job. Another 250 non-unionized workers have remained employed overseeing care and maintenance.

But United Steelworkers director Wayne Fraser says, training the non-union workers won’t be easy.

“I don’t know if they are going to be able to start operations,” Fraser says. “You are talking about (replacing) seasoned operators in the pit and those qualifications aren’t turned over in two or three hours.”

The workers will receive just as much training as other employees would, says Cory McPhee, Vale Inco vice president of corporate affairs.

“We’ve done this over the last several months in Ontario,” says McPhee, referring to the company’s mining and smelting operations in Sudbury, where 3,500 people have been on strike since July. “And we have no lack of confidence that the program will go well.”

McPhee says that some of the employees would normally be supervising the roles they will be doing, though some people may be doing an entirely new job. “But we wouldn’t put anybody in a role they couldn’t perform safely,” he says.

Keeping the mine on care and maintenance is not sustainable over the long term and the company has to move forward, McPhee says.

“We are a mining and processing operation and our customers rely on us for product,” McPhee says. “If we don’t maintain those relationships tehr emight be no business for anyone to come back to.”

Vale Inco has accused the United Steelworkers of using the Voisey’s Bay as leverage for the strike in Sudbury but the company stance is that they are two separate labour issues.

“They don’t want to settle until Ontario is figured out,” McPhee says.

USW’s Wayne Fraser says the union is willing to bargain but that the company has refused to do so in a meaningful way.

“I think (Vale Inco) thought our folks in Labrador and Newfoundland were weak,” Fraser says. “It has nothing to do with Sudbury, it has to do with the rights of our members up in Voisey’s Bay.”

The bargaining isn’t going well in Sudbury either. In fact, the United Steelworkers recently filed a “bad-faith” bargaining complaint against Vale Inco with the Ontario Labour Relations Board.

One of the key issues has been a bonus tied to the price of nickel. Vale wants to prelace it with a performance based bonus.

Steel and iron ore markets have experience a recovery recently nickel also improving slightly – now between US$8-9 per lb., from US$4-5 per lb. almost a year ago after spiking above US$20 in 2007.

Vale Inco could not say at what capacity Voisey’s Bay will be running. “We’re not disclosing any volumes. It will be partial production, it won’t be full,” Mc Phee says.