A second Unfair Labor Practice complaint filed by the Operating Engineers Local 3 union against Nevada Gold Mines has been settled, according to union district representative Scott Fullerton.
After Nevada Gold Mines was formed as a joint venture between Barrick Gold and Newmont in December 2019, there were disputes over how NGM was handling the union membership of the workers at the former Newmont mines north of Carlin. NGM said it wanted the former Barrick and Newmont workers at the mines in the Carlin Trend to vote on whether they wanted to be in the union. The OE3 union said NGM was not honoring the collective bargaining agreement with the former Newmont workers that was finalized in January 2019 and ran through March 2022.
The OE 3 union has represented Newmont workers at the Carlin Trend mines for more than 50 years.
The dispute went to the National Labor Relations Board. Such cases can sometimes take years to resolve, but NGM and the union had settlement talks before oral arguments began, and an agreement was reached on Aug. 6, 2020.
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In the settlement document, NGM said, “NGM will make whole, with interest and the appropriate withholdings, the bargaining unit employees to the extent they suffered economically as a result of NGM’s unilateral changes and failure to abide by the 2019-2022 Collective-Bargaining Agreement … including, but not limited to, any lost overtime or premium pay as a result of the unilateral changes.”
The union filed a second Unfair Labor Practice complaint against NGM on Feb. 23, 2021.
“The second Unfair Labor Practice was over how the contract was being enforced and applied,” Fullerton said. “We were running into a lot of issues where NGM wasn’t recognizing the parameters of the collective bargaining agreement.”
That complaint was settled March 28, 2022, just days before the three-year agreement was set to expire.
“We got a settlement resulting in back pay for some of the employees,” Fullerton said.
“A little over $700,000 in back pay issues were resolved and a few other items were resolved. And we got a one-year extension on the contract with a 2.5% wage increase. That will run through March of 2023.”
When the dispute over the union at NGM first got started after the formation of the joint venture, NGM Executive Managing Director Greg Walker said the company wanted to have a vote so all employees working side-by-side at the Carlin integrated operations would have the chance to decide whether they wanted to be represented or not. Walker said having some union workers and some non-union workers at the combined operations was not a situation they wanted to carry forward.
However, with the agreement from 2020, the former Newmont mines in the Carlin Trend have continued to be union mines, while the former Barrick mines are non-union.
“Basically what they do is they recognize that we still cover the legacy area that we covered before,” Fullerton said.
There are around 1,300 to 1,350 union members at the former Newmont mines in the Carlin Trend, Fullerton said, about the same number as before the formation of the joint venture.
“At this point we know we’ve got an extension, so we’ll be preparing to bargain here probably at the end of the year … so we can get started, get to the table right after the first of the year,” Fullerton said.
“The idea is to hopefully have a new agreement negotiated by the time this one expires.”