18 April, 2012
Workers belonging to several unions in Guinea began strike action on 4 April against UC Rusal at the Russian company’s Friguira alumina refinery in the city of Fria. The strike by 5,000 workers is termed an indefinite one and started after managers of the company refused to adhere to better working conditions for workers.
Rusal said the strike is illegal and has urged the Guinean government to intervene. On 10 April, the Russian Foreign Ministry in Moscow issued a terse statement calling strikers “extremist syndicalists,” urging the government to take decisive action to end the strike.
But late last week the government closed the offices of Rusal in the capital of Conakry – 100 kilometres from Fria – in violation of environmental regulations at Frigura. In September 2011, Guinea passed a new mining code mandating that a 35% stake of all resource-producing enterprises be placed in state hands. Rusal has resisted that law, even though it bought the bauxite and aluminium operation valued at US$257 million in 2006 for US$19 million.
Since, Guinea’s government has found that Rusal has evaded some US$860 in taxes due and non-payment of royalties.
At the Friguira operation, the only aluminium refinery in the West African country which holds roughly two-thirds of the world’s bauxite reserves, workers are seeking a doubling of the current US$200 monthly wage and for Rusal to pay their medical expenses. The Frigura refinery can produce 630,000 metric tonnes early of aluminium.
Rusal has a long history of exploiting workers in Guinea’s bauxite industry. In 2009, following an ICEM Contract and Agency Labour (CAL) workshop attended by government officials, the Russian industrial relations manager of the company, Anatoly Pantchenko, was expelled from the country after exposure to practices regarding the use of casual labour.
It was customary for Rusal to allow front-line managers to establish phantom labour brokering companies in order to hire casual workers at low pay with commissions going to the font-line bosses. The ICEM considered this practice the perpetuation of abject poverty in a country many consider to be the poorest nation on earth.