Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Minera Andes (MAI.to): Back to work at San José

The NR out of Minera Andes (MAI.to) this morning was short and to the point, that the 14 day strike at its 49% owned San José mine (aka Minera Santa Cruz) was over.We got a bit more out of Reuters last night in this post, that explains the two sides are now in compulsory conciliation, an Argentine mechanism where the State takes the role of middleman and gets the two sides to agreement...most of the time. What happens now is that work continues while a 15 day negotiation process happens to reach agreement between staff and brass...hopefully. And yes, you're right, this doesn't mean that the strike is over and done with because if things go well we're all happy and if things go badly the strikers will strike again once the 15 days are over. Local press with more details can be found here and here, with the Spanish language reports noting that strikers will be paid in full by the company instead of having their pay docked as management threatened (this agreement was the basis for the unions to agree to the compulsory conciliation mechanism).

So watch this space.