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First Quantum Minerals Ltd. (FM), a copper and nickel miner, said it signed a deal with Zambian labor unions to increase the pay of its workers in the southern African country by 10 percent next year.
The agreement with the National Union of Miners and Allied Workers and the Mineworkers Union of Zambia will also see wages climb a further 8 percent in 2015 and 9 percent in 2016, Godfrey Msiska, a spokesman for First Quantum’s Kansanshi Mining, told reporters today in the Zambian capital, Lusaka.
Zambia’s consumer inflation rate rose 6.9 percent in October from a year earlier, official statistics show.
The deal with Vancouver-based First Quantum comes after the Mineworkers Union of Zambia agreed to a 12 percent wage increase with Jinchuan Group Ltd. on Nov. 12. First Quantum is spending $650 million to build a smelter in Solwezi to process minerals stored up after a capacity shortage in Zambia, Africa’s biggest copper producer.
