Pitfalls and Pipelines - Philippine Indigenous Peoples Links

46 Pitfalls and Pipelines: Indigenous Peoples and Extractive Industries
Derivative instruments—the trading of options and futures
contracts—are widely recognized as being at the root
of the post-September 2008 credit collapses. And they have
certainly not exited the scene. On the contrary, some of these
tools, adopted predominantly for minerals and metals’ commodity
transactions, have returned. Once again, they threaten
to destroy any long-term market recovery, with their inherent
mismatch between meeting real human needs for metals and
promotion of an illusory demand for raw materials that are
not required for that purpose (for a further discussion of this
phenomenon, see Box 2).
Labor Woes
Scores of thousands of workplaces have also been sacrificed
over the past three years, not only at the pit face but
also in construction and automobiles—two industries intrinsically
dependent on processed minerals. These workplaces
may never be recovered. Without the billion dollar bailout of
General Motors by the Obama administration in 2012, many
metalworkers’ posts would have disappeared forever.
Meanwhile, companies around the world have been replacing
unionized workforces by contract laborers who are
fated to toil on low pay, without any security of tenure, or basic
social security provisions. This attrition was summed up by
the global mineworkers federation, ICEM, at the dawn of the
new decade:
“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.” 14
And this parlous situation has not materially improved
over the past 30 months.