Bulletins and News Discussion for December 11th to December 17th, 2023 - What's Yours is Mine - COTW: Canada

Image is of the Cobre Panama open-pit copper mine, located 120 kilometers west of Panama City.

Canada is a prolific mining country, hosting many of the world's top mining corporations. Some of its extraction is local - for example, Saskatchewan is the world's largest producer of potash, a critical agricultural nutrient. Much of the extraction is abroad. Naturally, this means that Canada has cut a bloody, but often ignored, path through the global periphery, extracting minerals and causing environmental degradation.

A notable recent example is that of the Cobre Panama copper mine, which is owned by First Quantum Minerals, one of the largest mining companies in Canada. The company earned $10 billion in revenue in 2022, of which the Cobre Panama mine generated $1 billion. Protests in Panama about this mine have gone on for over a decade, urging for a greater share of the profits, protection of indigenous people, and stronger environmental protections. Canada has maintained a stoney silence (pun somewhat intended) on these movements.

On October 20th, the president of Panama, Cortizo, renewed the company's mining concession for 20 years, after a halt in production since the end of 2022 due to negotiations and reform. Everybody hated this. In October, protestors took to the streets in sufficient numbers that Cortizo was forced to halt new mining approvals, and announced a public referendum on whether the contract with First Quantum should be repealed. This was immediately cut down, but the government decided to invalidate the new concession anyway in late November, calling it unconstitutional, and closing down the mine.

First Quantum Minerals has lost about half its market value since October. Various international banks have said that Panama could lose its investment-grade credit rating next year due to the income hit - the mine generated 5% of its GDP. The international arbitration process which First Quantum has initiated against Panama could last years.

The book Canada in the World: Settler Capitalism and the Colonial Imagination handles Canada's role as an imperialist, anti-indigenous, extractive state throughout its history, and is on our geopolitical reading list.

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Portuguese companies doing four-day week cut hours by 13.7%
More than 70% of the companies have adopted organisational changes, such as reducing the number and duration of meetings, creating work blocks or adopting new software, say the study’s coordinators, which indicates that 95% of the companies rate the test positively.
The four-day week also had an impact on workers’ mental health, with the anxiety index decreasing by 21%, fatigue by 23%, insomnia or sleep problems by 19%, depressive states by 21%, tension by 21% and loneliness by 14%.
Levels of exhaustion from work fell by 19%, and the percentage of workers who found it difficult or very difficult to reconcile work and family fell from 46% to 8%. The majority (65%) of workers spent more time with their families after the start of the reduction in working hours.
The report also indicates that 85% of workers “would only agree to move to a company with five-day working hours if they received a salary increase of more than 20%”.
- Based

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