http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/
KARRATHA, Australia — Joe Norton, a large man with a sunburned face, digs into a plate full of beef, potatoes, carrots and Brussels sprouts at Searipple, a mobile-home camp in Australia’s western frontier.
It isn’t the tastiest food in the world, the 54-year-old says, but it’s free, provided by his employer, iron mining giant Rio Tinto.
So is most everything else in his life: all of his meals, a manufactured house with microwave and flat-screen TV, a round-trip ticket every Friday to fly home, and not the least, his $180,000 salary.
Not bad for a man with an eighth-grade education doing semi-skilled work on railways transporting iron ore.
Yet the gig probably won’t last a lot longer, Norton reckons. Some of his fellow miners already have been sent packing as the company downsizes its contracted workforce. “They’re cleaning the fat,” he said.
With China’s slowing economic growth, one of the biggest mining booms in Australian history is over, leaving behind a trail of jobless workers and struggling local businesses in places such as Karratha, which thrived in recent years but now is at risk of becoming a ghost town.
China’s once-insatiable appetite for iron, copper and other metals led to such a surge in commodity prices that even manhole covers were stolen from streets in some countries to be sold for scrap. Exports from mineral-rich nations such as Australia soared, sending the cost of an ordinary three-bedroom home here to $1 million.
Today, China’s weaker growth has sent government budgets reeling. Currencies once bolstered by surging investments and exports to China are tumbling. Unemployment is shooting higher.
It’s a problem around the world, from Brazil to Indonesia to South Africa. Falling iron ore prices could affect Minnesota’s Iron Range, too — though operations such as those operated by Cliffs Natural Resources remain running at or near production capacity, for now.
Australia, though, is feeling the pain.
“Australia’s economy is not the golden goose it used to be,” said Adrian Hart, a mining and infrastructure expert at BIS Shrapnel, a research and forecasting firm in Sydney.
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