Via Rio Tinto today:
Rio Tinto is gearing itself for rising wage pressure in Australia and its other host nations after reporting a 69 per cent rise in full-year profits and paying out record dividends to shareholders.
The $US8.6 billion underlying profit reported on Wednesday was Rio’s best result since 2014, and it allowed the Anglo-Australian miner to beat market expectations with a $US2.90 full-year dividend and lower than expected debt.
With the mining sector set to report much improved profits this month, Rio chief executive Jean-Sebastien Jacques said workers would want their share of those profits.
“We expect across all the geographies the cost of the salaries to go up, and therefore for us the mine to market productivity agenda is so important because we need to make sure that we have momentum to more than offset inflation,” he said, adding that wage inflation was just one aspect of broader cost increases in the resurgent mining sector.
“When companies make more and more profit at some point in time these people want to have a fair distribution of wealth and you can see we start to have already signals that there is an expectation that wages will go up, maybe not in a big way this year, but if you take a five-year perspective we expect wage salaries to come back across all geographies where we operate.”
Sure, Mr Jacques. But is hasn’t come yet has it? And given you’re not investing in anything other than your share price it isn’t going to, either.
Here we have the living embodiment of everything that has gone wrong with Australian economic management. Rather than reap just rewards for their own resources, Australians must listen to this pap from an elite making hay for foreign shareholders. RIO is literally printing money at insane margins:
Meanwhile, the owners of the resource, you, are being starved of income as a tight Budget and commodity-price supported overly dollar high squashes all non-mining sources of external sector income:
When we try to change it, tax appropriately and provide fiscal relief to non-mining Australia and/or start a sovereign wealth fund to manage the currency, the miner just changes the PM.
Truly mismanagement of Banana Republic proportions.
