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Mining News: Donlin achieves promise of Native hire Residents of nearby villages provide nearly 90 percent of gold mine project’s work force; partners prepare training for future jobs Shane Lasley Mining News
While many people are familiar with the 30-million-ounce-plus gold deposit discovered at Donlin Creek in Southwest Alaska, the world-class gold resource boasts another less known but equally impressive statistic.
Nearly 90 percent of the 200-plus people working at the Donlin Project are shareholders of the Calista Corporation, the Native regional corporation that owns the land where the deposit is located.
“Calista Corp. has had great success with Barrick (Gold Corp.) and NovaGold (Resources Inc.) in the shareholder-hire program at the Donlin Creek project. No other exploration project in the world has had a better shareholder hire program,” Calista Chairman Art Heckman wrote in the corporation newsletter in March.
Some 86 percent of the 210 people who worked at the Donlin Creek Project in 2008 were Calista shareholders, according to a recent economic report.
This high percentage of Native hire also carried into management positions, where nine of 10 crew supervisors are Alaska Natives, according to “The Economic Benefits of Alaska’s Mining Industry,” a report prepared by the McDowell Group in January 2009.
The Donlin Creek project – operated by the Donlin Creek LLC, a 50-50 partnership between NovaGold and Barrick – is in transition from primarily an exploration project to a development project with construction targeted to begin in 2012 and production in 2015.
During the project’s construction phase, the need for skilled labor is expected to swell to 1,500 to 2,000 jobs, and once in production, Donlin Creek LLC plans to employ 600 to 800 people during the projected 20-year mine life.
Training for the future To maintain a high rate of employment of people from the Yukon-Kuskokwim region, Donlin Creek will need to train Calista shareholders for additional skill sets and jobs that the project will require as it advances into construction and production.
Anticipating the need of a work force of more than 1,000 people if the project wins its permits to operate, the Donlin developers are beginning to open facilities to train Calista shareholders.
Bill Bieber, who spearheaded the local-hire effort for Placer Dome in the early days of the project and is currently operations manager for Donlin Creek LLC, told Mining News that the company is presently helping develop three training sites in the Calista region to train shareholders in skills that the mine will need. The main facility will be in Bethel, with two satellite facilities in St. Mary’s and Aniak.
The facilities will initially provide training for the construction phase at Donlin. Bieber said electrical, plumbing, carpentry, welding and heavy equipment operation are examples of the initial training that will be provided.
A work force development committee is currently organizing to work out details of the training program, Bieber said. The committee will include directors of the three training facilities, representatives of the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development and the University of Alaska, along with Bieber and Mary Nelson, who will represent Donlin Creek.
The committee, once formed, will decide the scope of the curriculum to be taught at each facility and the class sizes needed to meet the work force needs.
Donlin Creek LLC is not currently engaged in drilling at the project and many of the drillers that explored Donlin are currently working on other projects.
Challenging past The local hire program at Donlin was first implemented by Placer Dome in 1996, in an effort to provide stable jobs and develop the skills of the Native people of the Yukon-Kuskokwim area.
The early years of the preferential hire program were challenging. During the first year of the program, Placer Dome hired 152 employees in order to keep 48 full-time positions filled. During that first year, the overall employee turnover rate was 318 percent. The program also experienced a high injury rate – about half of the people hired under the program failed drug screenings and about 70 percent of the locals who were hired quit after only a short time.
Undaunted by the challenges, Placer Dome – later acquired by Barrick Gold – continued to pursue its commitment to employ Calista shareholders. It became clear to the Donlin team that in order to succeed in their local-hire efforts, they would need to understand the reason for the failures and retool the program, according to Bieber.
Understanding the people To gain a deeper understanding of the social, cultural and economic obstacles that the employees were facing, the Donlin Creek team implemented a cross-cultural outreach plan. Wassillie Kameroff, a well respected leader within the Alaska Native community, was hired as program coordinator. He was well-known in the seven village areas where the majority of employees lived, and he played an important role in developing a solid working relationship between villages and the project.
Kameroff organized regular visits by project managers to more than 47 villages where employees lived with their families while not at the camp worksite.
“We were there to listen and learn, and it was an eye-opening experience,” Bieber recalled. “We found that even though the substance abuse problem was so pronounced, there were no support systems or treatments available locally.”
Based on what was learned from the outreach program, a new action plan for the local-hire program was put into motion. Among aspects of the new plan:
The company’s drug policy was redrafted to include hard and fast penalties, and yet provide for a period in which employees could re-apply for employment following a violation, provided they met certain milestones. This change meant employees could hope to improve their performance and be supported by incentives to remain drug-free and alcohol-free.
An onsite professional counselor was hired, specializing in substance abuse, family counseling, workplace counseling, and stress management.
Worker rotations were adjusted from 20 days on - 10 days off to a two week on - two week off rotation, 12 hours per day. This rotation allowed for more time at home, a good monthly wage, and time for traditional subsistence activities.
Cultural sensitivity training was conducted for both Native and non-Native employees. This gave everyone at Donlin an opportunity to learn about each others’ values, supporting open dialogue and creating a desire to work together.
Since Native villages in Alaska always include large gathering places, camp dining and recreational rooms were constructed to allow for more traditional, open interaction in a family-like setting. This open environment keeps non-Native employees from segmenting themselves off and encourages interaction between all groups of people.
The adjustments to the company’s local-hire outreach helped to create a highly successful Native work force at Donlin. Not only has the program succeeded in its goals for Calista shareholder-hire, but today the project boasts less than a five percent employee turnover rate as a result of substance abuse violations and an overall turnover rate of less than 10 percent.
Keys to success June McAtee, vice president of Calista’s land department, told Mining News that the key to the success of the shareholder-hire program at Donlin Creek was twofold: Calista’s ownership of the land encompassing the Donlin Creek deposit, and Placer Dome, Barrick Gold and NovaGold’s ongoing commitment to hiring and training shareholders at the project.
Because Calista owned the land, when the corporation negotiated the lease with Placer Dome, one of the terms of that agreement was that the mine developer would train and hire Calista shareholders whenever possible.
“There has been a continual process of hiring and training shareholders from the very beginning. Even though the original company (Placer Dome) isn’t there any more, the companies that came after it believed in those same concepts and did more than just pay it lip service. They actually acted on that, and took the lead, in fact, in the hiring and training,” McAtee said.
“The success of this thing has been the collaborative effort between the companies, the Calista Corp., The Kuskokwim Corp., and all of the village entities,” Bieber said.
Because Calista owned the Donlin Creek property, the Calista shareholders employed at Donlin Creek also have a vested interest in seeing the project succeed.
“The people who have worked on the project have a sense of proprietorship,” McAtee said. “They are in a way, as shareholders of the corporation, partial owners of the project. They have a vested interest that is personal to them in making the project go. They don’t look at it as some outside company. For 90-plus percent of the people, it is their relatives and neighbors and people they have known all their life. That makes a big difference.”
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