Trouble at Nevada Gold Mines
WHEN DREW* started working for the Newmont Corporation at a large gold mine in northeastern Nevada, it was a relief. At their previous mining job near Elko, a Nevada town heavily reliant on the industry, safety was not a priority. By comparison, Drew said, Newmont supported its workers when they raised serious safety issues. “It was never geared toward the blame game,” they told us. When Drew was injured, there “was no debate on if we should report it.”
But, as Drew recounted in multiple interviews this year, that positive safety culture began to unravel after a merger consolidated the region’s gold mines — some of the world’s largest — into a single company: Nevada Gold Mines.
“All they care about is the bottom line, pushing ore through,” Drew said in an interview.
In 2019, Barrick and Newmont formed a mega-company that would be managed by Barrick’s executives. The new company, Nevada Gold Mines, now accounts for about 75% of the state’s gold production. Earlier this year, High Country News and The Nevada Independent
published an investigation into Nevada Gold Mines’ outsized influence in northeastern Nevada. With about 7,000 employees and 4,000 contractors, Nevada Gold Mines dominates the economy of that part of the state, operating with enormous influence and little competition.
Since that investigation, which chronicled and and acknowledged that Nevada Gold Mines has the worst safety record of all the company’s divisions, which operate in Tanzania, Canada, the Dominican Republic and Papua New Guinea.
