Talent War | The Mining Battle

Bruno Rizzuto’s father, Cesare, was 19 when he got off a boat in Halifax from southern Italy in 1951. With no coat, and “5 cents in his pocket” he headed for the gold mines of Timmins, Ontario, where he worked underground for 41 years.

Six decades later Rizzuto, a Calgary-based recruiter, is looking for people like his father, with a proposal to bring 10 to 20 miners to Canada from South America as companies scour the world to find workers for the latest mining boom.

“There are just simply not the people there, and I think it’s going to be the Achilles heel of the industry,” said Rizzuto, 38, managing partner at Cadre Staffing Inc. “A lot of these projects will not be able to get off the ground because they will not have either the management capacity to do so or the operational workforce.”

Mining companies such as Barrick Gold Corp. (ABX) are struggling to fill vacancies amid a skills shortage that stretches from the iron-ore pits of Western Australia to Chile’s copper mines and the gold deposits of Quebec. Producers of commodities including gold, copper and coal are building mines to feed demand from countries like China just as geologists, engineers and miners begin to retire en masse, pushing up wages and crimping productivity…

Source:

Read More @ Mining skills battle heats up – SUSTAINABLE MINING – Mineweb.com | The world’s premier mining and mining investment website Mineweb.

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