“We saw about 30,000 actual miners in Canada in 1999 compared to that many in Sudbury alone in 1970,” explained Jamie Kneen, the national program co-lead for Mining Watch Canada, an industry watchdog organization founded in 1999.
Kneen joined the COS Talk podcast to discuss the state of the industry, and he said automation was changing the industry at the turn of the millennium. “We’ve seen remote control operations on some things, and now they’re moving to fully automated machinery.”
Automation in the name of safety
Kneen says that greater automation is making the industry safer by reducing interactions between people and heavy machinery. “There are fewer people doing harm…there are fewer people working dangerously,” Kneen said. But he argues that the small number of people who still work in high-risk settings also face another set of safety challenges that come with working in small teams, or alone.
“This has implications for the small number of people who are still in the frontline heavy equipment operating capacity, because it’s a small team,” Kneen explained. He says there are fewer people to make sure the operation runs smoothly and solve problems when they arise, “if something goes wrong now, there’s no one else around you.” That also limits the level of socializing and team building that happens at work and at lunches.
Overall, Kneen says technological advances have improved frontline safety, “but it’s still dangerous and there are injuries and deaths.”
