Doug Ashbury
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Nov 17/99) - It will be several weeks before ex-Giant workers know if they've been hired on at Lupin, mine manager Bill Danyluk said Monday.

Danyluk said Lupin mine owner Echo Bay is interviewing about 50 ex-Giant miners. Five Echo Bay staff conducted the interviews earlier this week at the Explorer Hotel.

Echo Bay is doing what it can to meet with the miners but Lupin, once restarted, will be a leaner operation than when it was put on care and maintenance two years ago, Danyluk adds.

The "new" Lupin will require 323 staff compared to just over 400 when the mine was operational, Danyluk said.

Lupin is located in Nunavut on Contwoyto Lake north of BHP Diamonds' Ekati mine. Restarting the gold mine will take about five months. With a re-engineering plan, Echo Bay estimates it can produce gold at Lupin at about $245 US an ounce.

Of the 323 total staff who will be needed to run Lupin, Danyluk estimated as many as 80 per cent could be employees who lost jobs when the mine shutdown in January 1998 due to low gold prices.

"We're really going to rely on our ex-employees," he said.

If 80 per cent of the former staff came back and 60 people were hired from the Kitikmeot region, that leaves only nine spots.

If the mine is able to re-hire this large a percentage of former employees, "that doesn't leave a lot of positions" left over, he said.

"Of the people we contacted only about one or two per cent said they weren't interested in coming back," he said.

But, he adds, this was prior to remuneration changes.

The recommissioned Lupin will have an 11-day work schedule, down from 12, and porarily mothballed.

Another factor is that the company is hoping to hire 40-60 people from the communities of Kugluktuk and Cambridge Bay.

Echo Bay will be conducting interviews in these two communities in December.

Echo Bay would like to transfer Giant's workers to Lupin, Danyluk said. But such a move would not allow us to operate, he said.

What the company is hoping to do is hire as many Giant workers as possible to ease some of the pain of the Giant mine closure, he said.

As for transportation, Echo Bay will be flying staff to Lupin from four locations; Yellowknife, Cambridge Bay, Kugluktuk and Edmonton. The company will use its company Corp. Air to fly staff. Catering at the mine will be done by Kitikmeot Caterers.

Hank Pankratz, an underground shift boss who worked at Giant for three-and a-half years, was among those to be interviewed Monday.

He said it was an opportunity to speak with Lupin managers one on one.

For them, "it's an opportunity to find out who's available," he said.

Asked if efforts to get on at Lupin don't work out, Pankratz, who has resumes in at BHP and Diavik, said "life goes on."

In fact, he said this area has some of the best opportunities for miners.

"Doors are opening here, even though they may be months away," he said.

As of Monday, Canadian Autoworkers Local 2304 president Marc Danis said there were about 30 people still working at Giant mine. That number will drop to about 24 when the mine is on care and maintenance.