Wages within the industry tend to keep pretty much in line, he adds, because skilled mining labour is in short supply.But the biggest concern is for Codelco, which produces a tenth of the world's copper.
"Your work is a lot more skilled than mine," Mr. Cvijanovic observed from across the room.
Skilled at mining the psychological terrain of her characters, she explores gender, androgyny and social expectation in Orlando, which doubled as a literary love letter to Vita Sackville-West.
After wage negotiations failed, the National Union of Mineworkers began a strike on August 7th, joined a day later by Solidarity, a union representing skilled, mainly white, mine employees.
"There's still a lot of conflict around mining globally because mining companies are enormously skilled in technical aspects of mining, but the sector doesn't yet value the importance of the social domain," says Daniel Franks, lead researcher on the report Conflict with communities a big cost to business, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The emergence of big data – a term used to describe sets of data so large, disparate and proliferating that traditional data processing applications aren't able to handle them – has led to a growing need for skilled professionals who can mine and interpret the required data sets to help businesses make better strategic decisions.
By custom, whites performed all skilled labour in the mines (a practice enshrined in the "job colour bar" provisions of the 1911 Mines and Works Act), commanding in return wages 5 to 10 times higher than those earned by blacks.
Management is equally skilled at exploration, prospecting, mining, controlling costs and arranging acquisitions and joint ventures, he said.
