BHP Workers Strike at Its Largest Aluminum Smelter

BHP Billiton Ltd. workers in South Africa began a strike for higher pay at the company’s largest aluminum smelter.

The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, which is demanding a 12 percent wage increase, said others will join the 200 employees who began the walkout at the Hillside and Bayside smelters owned by world’s largest mining company.

“More will join as the workers from the other shifts start,” Mbuso Ngubane, regional secretary, said by mobile phone today. Numsa represents 700 of the 900 working at the plants.

South African workers from teachers to miners have secured pay increases of more than 10 percent this year, almost three times the October annual inflation rate of 3.4 percent. Miners at Northam Platinum Ltd. ended a 43-day strike after gaining wage increases of as much as 13 percent. Numsa members have rejected BHP’s pay offer of just over 7 percent, Ngubane said.

“Our offer is more than fair and reasonable,” BHP said in an e-mailed response to queries today. The offer of 7.5 percent has been accepted by more than 70 percent of employees at the company’s South African aluminum unit, it said.

BHP is the seventh-largest aluminum producer with output of 1.2 million metric tons in the 2010 fiscal year. Hillside, with capacity of 715,000 tons, is the biggest smelter in the Southern Hemisphere, while Bayside adds about 96,000 tons, BHP says.