Chile's Copper Miners Just Voted 98.73% to Strike a Company Whose Profits Doubled

Two unions representing roughly 730 workers at Minera Centinela, in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, voted this week to authorize a strike with 98.73% support. Every eligible member cast a ballot. The demand is not exotic: workers doing identical jobs at the same mine, represented by a different union, are paid more. The two unions — Minera Esperanza and Distrito Centinela — say the company's "final offer" of September 23 doesn't touch the disparity at all.

The timing is the part that should make anyone's blood pressure rise. Antofagasta plc, the London-listed owner of Centinela, just reported the best year in its history: revenue up 30% to $8.6 billion in 2025, EBITDA up 52% to a record $5.2 billion, underlying earnings up 106%. Copper hit record prices. The company's margin widened to 60%. None of that windfall, apparently, reached far enough down the org chart to close a pay gap between two sets of workers standing at the same crusher.

This is the copper boom in miniature: electrification, grid expansion, and data-center demand are handing mining capital a historic run, and the workers extracting the metal are being asked to fight, ballot by ballot, mine by mine, for parity that costs the company a rounding error against a $5.2 billion EBITDA line. Chile's Labour Code gives Antofagasta an easy out — request "obligatory mediation" within four days and the strike clock stops while the Labour Directorate tries to broker a deal. A supervisors' union at the same mine did exactly this dance in May: voted to strike at 77%, then had the walkout suspended pending mediation. The legal architecture is built to metabolize worker leverage into paperwork, again and again, while the ore keeps moving.

None of this is unique to Chile. It's the standard operating model of extractive capital everywhere: run parallel bargaining units so workers doing the same labor are never on the same footing, then negotiate each one down separately while consolidated profit statements move in only one direction. Divide the floor, unify the balance sheet. The union response here — bargaining jointly for the first time at this mine, demanding not just a raise but "a mechanism to stop the difference reappearing" — is the correct instinct: you don't just win one number, you close the structural gap that let the company create two tiers of workers in the first place.

A strike vote isn't a strike. Under Chilean law it takes effect on the fifth day after the ballot unless mediation intervenes, and nothing is guaranteed. But 98.73% on a full-turnout ballot, at a mine sitting inside a company posting record profits, is the clearest signal yet that record commodity prices are not going to trickle down on their own. They get bargained down, mine by mine, vote by vote.

Sources

Rio Times: Minera Centinela Strike Vote Passes With 98.73% Backing in Chile
Antofagasta plc: 2025 Full Year Results
Antofagasta plc: Full-Year Results for the Year Ended 31/12/2023