An estimated 9,000 workers at the giant Grasberg copper mine operated by the Indonesian unit of Freeport McMoRan Inc will extend a strike for a second month, a union official said on Saturday, in an ongoing dispute over employment terms and layoffs.
Freeport is at loggerheads with Indonesia over rights to the Grasberg mine in Papua in a dispute that has cost both sides hundreds of millions of dollars, and tensions with workers threaten to disrupt the mine's operations further. Freeport resumed copper concentrate export shipments from Grasberg late last month after a 15-week outage stemming from the dispute with government and had planned to ramp up production after it was cut by around two-thirds during the outage.
As of mid-April Freeport had "demobilized" around 10 percent of its Indonesian workforce of 32,000 among efforts to cut costs resulting from the dispute. The company has repeatedly warned workers that striking will result in disciplinary action. The union has demanded an end to Freeport's furlough policy and began a 30-day strike on May 1 in an effort to get workers' jobs back.
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