Bury Me Standing: October 2011

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

JAKARTA, Indonesia — As the Occupy Wall Street movement spreads like dominoes, resentment toward corporate greed has led to the deaths of four Indonesians and the temporary closure of the American-owned Grasberg mine, one of the world’s largest gold and copper mines, in the remote region of West Papua.

Workers at the giant mine, which is owned by the U.S.-based Freeport-McMoran, are on strike for the second month straight. Although the company says it has managed to hire outsourced workers to prevent any significant slowdown in production, that all changed on Monday when the mine halted production for security reasons. Markets, however, have yet to react to the closure.

Workers at Freeport’s Grasberg mine — which accounts for more than 90 percent of the company’s gold output — receive a minimum of between $1.50 and $3 an hour, the lowest of any Freeport-McMoran operation worldwide.
Video: Occupy movement goes global
“The question is,” asks John Rumkoren, a native Papuan Freeport worker who has been researching the numbers online, “If Freeport has such high profits and low production costs, why can’t they pay us the same as they pay their workers in North and South America and Africa?”
Some 80 percent of the mine’s 12,000 workers have been on strike since Sept. 15 and say they will continue until their wage demands are met. As negotiations between the company’s management and its workers have failed to reach an agreement, the situation has rapidly deteriorated.
In a violent clash between protestors and police last Monday, one Freeport employee was shot dead and six others were injured. An ambush on Friday, which police claim was the work of Papuan separatists, resulted in the death of three others.
For both Papuan workers and the tribes that live around the mine, tensions that have been brewing for decades appear to have reached a tipping point. Current strikes are the longest in history, with workers criticizing the U.S. company for not sharing its profits and having no Papuans on its management board. In the surrounding villages, tribal elders have publicly derided Freeport for failing to live up to its promises to give back to Papuan society.
“We want Freeport to contribute to our lives and develop our society through education and human-resource development, not through money or the military,” said Rumkoren, who has been working at Grasberg for the past decade.