It may have been announced as only a three-day strike at a relatively small colliery. However, discontent by Australian workers with UK-Swiss mining giant, Xstrata, has been boiling throughout the past year. Earlier this month, workers at the company’s Tahmoor mine in New South Wales decided to stop work in support of their demands for better pay and conditions. The global mineworkers federation, ICEM, sees this strike as “a key test in Australia regarding a company shifting the burden of the recent economic collapse onto workers.” Says the ICEM: “From Russia to Chile, at Europe’s largest zinc deposits in Ireland’s County Meath, where 670 were retrenched by Tara Mines, to the hundreds of thousands of migrant miners across the world who are out of work with no place to go, it is workers who are paying the unjust price of capital’s failure.”
See http://www.minesandcommunities.org/article.php?a=9923.