New! Corporate scumbag: Rio Tinto

Rio Tinto

“Wherever we operate, we work as closely as possible with our hosts, respecting laws and customs minimising, adverse impacts and ensuring transfer of benefits and enhancement of opportunities.” — Rio Tinto 2000 Annual Review.

The wealth of world's largest mining company, Rio Tinto's, has come, literally, from the blood and sweat of its workers.

The company was founded in 1873 to mine the Rio Tinto copper deposit in the Spanish province of Andalusia. Many of its workers were paid in food and several hundred of them died from lung diseases like silicosis between 1877 and 1887.

The miners' early attempts to establish a union were met with mass sackings. The company's ruthlessness was funded by English and German capitalists, enabling them to expand their mine in Spain.

During the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, the region surrounding Rio Tinto's mine was occupied by the fascist forces of General Francisco Franco.

Rio Tinto's then chairperson Sir Auckland Geddes reported approvingly to the company's 1937 annual general meeting in London: “Since the mining region was occupied by General Franco's forces, there have been no further labour problems ... Miners found guilty of troublemaking are court-martialled and shot.”

The 1950s and 1960s were tumultuous times for Rio Tinto. Two-thirds of its Spanish mine was sold and it expanded its exploration and mining to “safe” countries like Canada, Australia, the US, Papua New Guinea and South Africa.

In South Africa, Rio Tinto developed the Palabora copper and uranium lode in the Transvaal. At the time, the vicious apartheid regime was savagely repressing the black majority.

Rio Tinto supplied uranium from its Rossing mine in Namibia to Britain, under both Conservative and Labour governments, in defiance of United Nations sanctions against apartheid.

In 1962, Rio Tinto merged with Consolidated Zinc, greatly increasing concentration in the mining industry. The new corporation, called Rio Tinto-Zinc (RTZ), now mined uranium, gold, iron ore, bauxite and zinc and owned various smelting companies.

Its rise and rise continued into the 1980s, when it bought out BP US. In 1995, it merged with its Australian subsidiary Conzinc Riotinto of Australia to form RTZ-CRA. In 1997, it changed its name to Rio Tinto.

In 2000 alone, Rio Tinto's own statistics acknowledge that it was responsible for 35 “significant” environmental “incidents”, including 15 “significant spills”, an 18% increase in “land disturbed” and five employee deaths for which Rio Tinto is “very sad”.

But Rio Tinto's sordid history does not end there. Rio Tinto owns 16.3% of the Lihir island gold mine in far north-eastern Papua New Guinea and is primarily responsible for the mine's operation. Lihir is one of the world's richest gold mines, with a projected annual revenue of US$900 million, and is expected to operate for 36 years, producing an average of 600,000 ounces of gold each year.

In its hurry to exploit this, the company has flagrantly violated its own code of conduct and international environmental law, among other things by:

• dumping 89 million tonnes of cyanide-contaminated mine waste (tailings) into the ocean;

• dumping 330 million tonnes of waste rock into the ocean;

• killing surrounding coral reefs and fish;

• destroying seven kilometres of coral reef and a major nesting zone for the Melanesian scrubfowl and leather-backed turtle, including a harbour which has one of the richest areas of marine biodiversity on Earth; and

• caused shellfish to die or to accumulate toxic levels of heavy metals, making them unfit for consumption.

In 1997-8, knowing that the mine project would provoke widespread community anger, Rio Tinto approached the US Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) for financing for “political risk insurance”. After conducting its own environmental review, OPIC concluded that the project would be too much of an obvious violation of international environmental law to warrant funding.

The Australian government and the World Bank, however, backed the project, turning a blind eye to both the London Dumping Convention and South Pacific Convention, which prohibit the dumping of tailings into the ocean.

When Rio Tinto's chairperson, Sir Roderick Carnegie, said at its 1984 shareholders' meeting: “The right to land depends on the ability to defend it”, he was right.

Ordinary people throughout the world are finding that the right to a job, good wages, human dignity and land rights depends on the ability to fight and beat Rio Tinto.

Rio Tinto is one of the corporations which will be targeted during the October 3-5 blockade of the Commonwealth Business Forum in Melbourne.

BY SALLY HUNTER & CHRIS ATKINSON