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strong>July 12, Online

A few clicks on the keyboard of his computer was enough to get Simon Windesi and his friends riled up about the low wages their employer, a global mining giant, pays in this far-flu Indonesian province.

After years of toiling at Freeport-McMoran’s gold and copper mine in easternmost Papua province — where tribesman can still be found living a near-Stone Age existence in dense jungles and rugged mountains — many still get just US$1.80 an hour.

“That’s a 10th of what the company pays workers in other countries!” the 43-year-old said after a quick Internet search. “And this is their biggest profit-maker. Their production costs are the lowest. How does that make sense?”

The men are among 10,000 employees who — while renegotiating contracts and protesting the dismissal of six union leaders — last week brought operations at Grasberg, the world’s biggest gold mine by known reserves, to a standstill.

Within days of launching their July 4 strike, the site, a sooty kilometer-wide gash in the otherwise lush Puncak Jaya mountain range, was all but abandoned.

Your comments:

Indonesia needs to renegotiate this plunder of our nation’s wealth.

If it will not bring prosperity to the Indonesian people, then this arrangement has no meaning and we would be better off closing it.

Let the citizens of the area mine their own gold and get rich from it because the state has failed to uphold its obligation of managing the natural resources for the benefit of the people as is warranted by the Constitution.

Doing away with the bureaucracy and giving the rights to those wealth back to the people living there is the best way.

Just tell those Papuans how much cargo they’ll get from digging for those yellow stones.

The rest of Indonesia can then benefit by selling the gold-laden Papuans goods and services they can’t produce themselves.

Gold production through that method might be far smaller but at the very least, the wealth generated will benefit all in this country, including the government which can earn bigger tax revenue.

There’s no need for these large foreign corporations which are funneling our natural wealth to their own countries.

Freeman Prometheus
Jakarta

The government has no talent to deal with the people.

Freeport is dealing with the wrong people at the right time.

Core
Jakarta

Why are there so many reports about the strike, but not a single article about the “sweeping operations” the military currently does again?

Why is it a big issue, if a company loses some money, but if people are killed and villages are destroyed, nobody in Indonesia seems to care?

Markus Hagenauer
Himmelreich, Germany

I have been to Jayapura and was very surprised that everything is so expensive.

Yet the locals are very poor. Freeport should give more.

Rina
Jakarta

The cost of life in West Papua is double or triple of that in Indonesia. The work in the mine is very hard.

A workers’ wage is the source of income for an extended family. Many of those families have been displaced from their traditional land because of the mine.

It is legitimate that Freeport shares a bit of its huge profits with those who have been dispossessed of their traditional way of life.

Filippo Giancarlo
Jimbaran, Bali