Retirees reap benefits of labour shortage (April 02, 2007)

Frank Visockas spent 30 years working for Inco in Sudbury, Ont., but when it came time for the miner to retire five years ago, he found he wasn’t interested in improving his golf game.

“Was I ready to retire at fifty? No,” Visockas says. “And there were good opportunities for making extra money.”

With the commodities boom and a major labour shortage on the horizon, it didn’t take long before Visockas found himself back underground. Now 55, he’s working as a captain at Wesdome Gold Mines’ Eagle River gold mine near Wawa, Ont., about five hours from Sudbury. He works 10 days on, 10 days off, and even though this means living away from home half the time, Visockas doesn’t mind because the schedule at Garson was more demanding.

“The world is driven by money, and mining companies hold a carrot in front of you,” he says. “The carrot at Wesdome was a better carrot.”

But even the best carrots won’t help the nation’s mining industry fill the 80,000 job openings it’s expecting over the next 10 years. That’s why the Mining Industry Human Resources Council (MiHR) has recently received $2.5 million from the federal government for a 3-year program called the Mining Attraction Recruitment and Retention Strategy (MARS).

“We are at the very front end of the crisis,” says Paul Hebert, executive director of MiHR.

MiHR hopes to attract more women, aboriginals and new Canadians to the mining sector, as well as educate kids as early as Grade 3 about mining and the opportunities available to them.

“Mining has an outdated view of being dirty, dangerous and low-paying work,” Hebert says. “The average wage in the industry as a whole is well over $1,000 per week.”

Hebert says all levels and sectors in the industry are feeling the pinch. There’s a demand for skilled trades people, engineers and geologists. Hebert says the shortage could mean the difference between new projects coming into production or remaining undeveloped.

The labour shortage is driven by two factors: an aging workforce and high commodity prices.

Production is already being affected by the shortage of workers as mining companies scramble to retain trained staff.

Wesdome Gold Mines fell behind on its 2006 production target at the Kiena gold mine in Val d’Or, Que., because of a shortage of workers. Director of investor relations at the company, Donovan Pollitt, says it’s even worse for the company’s Eagle River gold mine near Sudbury, Ont.

“Everybody’s like ‘yay mining, yay mining, everything’s great,’ but one of the byproducts that you’ve got is recruiters in Sudbury going to kids’ soccer games telling people’s wives they shouldn’t be working at a remote gold camp when they will match their income in Sudbury,” Pollitt says.

Pollitt says salaries have gone up 20% to 30% in the last few years just to retain people.

“It’s been quite drastic,” he says.

While Visockas says he experienced some animosity for being a “double dipper” when he went back to work after retirement, Hebert says people with as much experience as Visockas are a part of MiHR’s recruitment strategy.

“We’re trying to figure out how to bring back older workers,” Hebert says. “They are a huge loss of intellectual capital (when they retire).”

He says a pensioner that goes back to work now is definitely not taking a job away from a new entrant.

Training risky

Training is costly and risky for mining companies, especially with the demand for skilled workers in today’s market. Eagle River mine manager Ron Price says it costs about $90,000 per person and with the high turnover lately, it’s a huge risk to train someone new.

Price says MARS is a welcome initiative after Wesdome’s recent experience with training; the company spent $250,000 on a stope training course for 12 new employees but only one stayed to work for the company, quitting a year and a half later.

“It’s better to pay skilled people more,” Price says.

But when you can’t find skilled workers to hire, it can have a huge impact on production. Doug Miller, general manager of Revett Minerals Troy copper-silver mine in western Montana says that even though the mine was reopened in 2005, the company has still not reached the production rate originally forecast.

“The lack of skilled workers pushed everything back a couple of years,” Miller says. “Most of the people who applied for jobs didn’t have underground mining experience.”

Miller says Revett had planned to produce 6,000 to 6,500 tonnes per day at Troy by now, but has only managed a level of around 4,400 tonnes per day.

Revett has had to initiate its own training programs and hire outside people to do extra operating and maintenance training, which Miller says is quite costly.

The Troy mine currently employs about 175 people. Miller says it took until the end of 2006 to build the staff to that level — a year longer than anticipated.

“It’s frustrating because you can’t find the people with the skill level that you need, it’s frustrating that you’re not getting the production that was anticipated,” Miller says.

There are some encouraging signs on the training front. Aspiring miners of all ages are flocking to Sudbury to take the Northern Centre for Advanced Technology (NORCAT) common core training underground mining course, which is needed to work at any mine in Ontario.

Cindy Laurin, the course co-ordinator, says the course is booked until September. A class of 24 begins the 1-month course every two weeks — more than double the number two years ago.

While most students are about 25 to 35 years old, Laurin says people up to 55 have signed up for the course recently. She says they are also seeing more women take the course — about one every month or two.

Diamond discoveries in Northern Canada have prompted the development of a new industrial mine training program at Aurora College in Yellowknife, N.W.T. To help meet the demand for skilled underground workers, the college has partnered with Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, BHP Billiton Diamonds, Diavik Diamond Mines, De Beers Canada and the government of the Northwest Territories to buy a full-scale underground mine training simulator as well as three desktop simulators to provide hands-on learning.