Fifty years of copper mining: the US labor productivity
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Fifty years of copper mining: the US labor productivity Hamit Aydin 1 Received: 21 October 2018 / Accepted: 18 November 2018 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract In the past 50 years, the US copper mining industry has experienced remarkable changes. During the 1970s and early 1980s, the US copper mining industry suffered a major recession. However, a few companies survived by implementing severe cost-cutting measures through innovation and technological changes. These efforts, in turn, helped quintuple labor productivity in the three decades following. Then from 2003 to 2012, labor productivity declined sharply to the levels equal to those of the early 1980s. This decline, following years of rising productivity, has led to questioning the effects of innovation and technological change on mining labor productivity. It has been argued that new technology will no longer be able to offset the adverse effects of depletion thus resulting in higher prices in the future. This study investigates the determinants of copper mining labor productivity empirically, and the extent to which they may vary cyclically for longer time spans (1965 to 2015) from the US perspective. The statistical model examines the level of labor productivity as a function of copper price, recoverable copper content of ore (percentage yield), production share of leaching, mine production index, and time trend. Overall, the results support the conclusion that falling productivity is mostly cyclical. Keywords Mining productivity . Determinants . SxEw . US copper
Introduction The US copper mining industry has experienced dramatic changes in copper mining production and labor productivity in the last 50 years. As we might recall, the US copper mining industry suffered a major decline during the 1970s and early 1980s and recovery started in the following years. This recovery in copper mining is reflected as a sharp jump in industry labor productivity (Fig. 1). Starting from 1980, industry labor productivity more than tripled in 1989, going from 18.8 to 60.8 ton per 1000-man-hour. Productivity growth then slowed down. Annual increases in industry labor productivity were on average 14% in those years (1980 to 1989) and later in the This article is dedicated to John Tilton on the occasion of his 80th birthday for his contributions to mineral economics and its use in understanding the behavior of mineral commodity markets, for the patient guidance, encouragement and advice he has provided throughout my time as his student and for his kind and firm friendship. * Hamit Aydin [email protected]; [email protected] 1
Department of Mining Engineering, Zonguldak Bulent Ecevit University, Zonguldak, Turkey
following years labor productivity showed a continuous growth (on average 7.1%) reaching to 94.4 ton per 1000man-hour in 2003. The overall increase in labor productivity was much larger for the 1980–2003 period. It had quintupled. The most striking development apparent in Fig. 1, however, far from its peak in 20
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