Contractor safety management

We make no distinction between the safety of our contractors and that of our employees. Contractors are included in our safety performance data, and must comply in full with our safety standards and procedures. Our business relies extensively on contractors to provide additional labour and for specialised skills and services, and our use of contractors will grow as our major projects enter the construction phase.

Under our Group-wide SD Framework, one of our 17 SD Standards is dedicated to the management of contractors, suppliers and partners and we continuously review our contractor management practices to ensure that the supervision of and communication with site contractors is appropriate to the safety risks involved in their activities. We assess the safety record of a contractor when awarding contracts and performing contractor reviews. We monitor high-risk activities closely, provide regular feedback on performance and act on any failures by contractors to comply with our procedures. In some instances, where appropriate, we have reduced our contractor base in order to improve accountability and enable us to ensure safety standards that are consistent with our own. Serious incidents require the direct involvement of the contractor chief executive with the chief executive of our commodity business and may lead to the termination of contracts.

We also understand the importance of differentiating between long-term contractors who are effectively part of the Xstrata workforce and intermittent contractors who may only spend a few days on site at an Xstrata operation every few months. The latter present an additional challenge in terms of ensuring they understand and adhere to our safety standards and procedures, and they require greater supervision. Our operations are developing and implementing approaches to better manage safety risks associated with intermittent contractors, that include:

• Ensuring the planned activities by the contractor are properly identified and reviewed – preferably before the contractor comes on site and, as a minimum, before any work is started – to identify any safety hazards and risks;
• Ensuring the contractor is made fully aware of any safety hazards as well as the associated procedures and systems to be respected; and
• Assigning a level of supervision that is commensurate with the level of risk of the tasks being performed.

Xstrata Copper’s Alumbrera mine in north-western Argentina has established a contractor auditing and management system that has allowed the site to improve adherence to Xstrata’s safety practices, SD Framework and Business Principles amongst the dozens of contractor firms employed at the mine complex. Local contractors have praised the programme for helping them to better understand Xstrata’s policies and standards and to improve their safety performance.