Racist Mining Company Reports It Is Very Sexist, and Also Racist

More than 20 ladies staff of Rio Tinto, one of many world’s largest mining corporations, reported a rape or tried sexual assault whereas on the job, whereas a 3rd of all feminine staff and seven% of male staff skilled sexual harassment within the office, the corporate mentioned this week.

The mining large launched a complete report on Tuesday, which it had commissioned itself, offering a take a look at a number of the issues in its office tradition. The report, titled “Everyday Respect,” discovered that bullying is “systemic” throughout the corporate, whereas sexism happens at “unacceptable rates” and racism is “common.” Sounds like an amazing place to work!

Rio Tinto is a big firm—it operates in 35 countries, and has greater than 47,000 staff—so the truth that these attitudes are so widespread is trigger for alarm. The report comes after the Australian authorities launched an inquiry into the treatment of women at mining sites, and finds that greater than 40% of feminine staff at websites often called “fly-in, fly-out”—websites with distant entry—have skilled sexual harassment. The report didn’t delve into gender id, however discovered that LGBTQI+ staff, even those that weren’t open about their id at work, also experienced “significantly elevated rates of bullying, sexual harassment, and racism.”

Racism, the report discovered, can also be a part of the tradition at Rio Tinto. “There was a strong view that, in some parts of Rio Tinto, racism is ‘normalised’, with one employee stating, ‘I have copped racism in every single corner of this company,’” the report reads.

The findings on racism within the report aren’t significantly shocking—the corporate doesn’t precisely have a stellar public monitor report on caring in regards to the rights of non-white folks, particularly Aboriginal folks. (Almost 40% of male Rio Tinto staff figuring out as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander reported that they skilled office racism.) In 2020, the corporate blew up two mining websites that had been occupied by Indigenous teams some 46,000 years in the past—regardless that priceless artifacts had been found on the website in 2014, and regardless of pleas from Aboriginal teams and archaeologists to permit additional exploration of the location. Last 12 months, an Aboriginal group accused the corporate of actually throwing necessary artifacts from a separate mining website in Australia into the trash within the early Nineteen Nineties, then conserving the destruction of these artifacts secret from the general public for many years.

Amid the worldwide furor over Black Lives Matter in June 2020, Rio Tinto issued what appeared like an apology letter for its actions, however an govt later clarified that they weren’t really sorry for blowing up the mine, solely sorry for making folks upset. That’s unhazardous solidarity for you! (Rio Tinto’s CEO and two different prime executives later resigned over the problem.)

Here within the U.S., the corporate isn’t a lot better. For years, Rio Tinto, in tandem with mining firm BHP, has been combating for the correct to mine a stretch of forest in Arizona that’s sacred to the native Apache and different Native teams. The Trump administration gave the challenge the inexperienced mild, which the Biden administration then rescinded.

“We are deeply disturbed by these findings, and we sincerely apologise to every team member, past or present, who has suffered because of these behaviours,” Rio Tinto mentioned in a public response to the report. The firm would possibly need to look broader to start out issuing apologies for lots of its previous actions.