Labour’s utilization and labour’s productivity of a gold mine in Saudi Arabia

According to Dean1, the largest component of an underground mine’s operating expenses is the labour cost, typically from 40% to 50% with some as high as 60% of the total cost. Industrial managers know that the total cost will go down if they can accomplish the job with fewer people. Moreover, enhancing the productivity per man-hour is one of the greatest savings in manpower and that can be a powerful incentive to any mine. Increasing productivity means that the same work can be performed with fewer people. It is very attractive to any productive company to increase productivity without any extra cost. Thus, reducing the cost of labour is seen as a direct goal to reduce the total production cost and increase the mine profitability. Literature review indicates that in order to optimize productivity, the pertaining factors must be studied. Thus, in this paper, one of the human factors that affect productivity in an underground gold mine in Saudi Arabia was investigated. The human factor that was studied carefully, is labour’s utilization and labour’s productivity. According to Grayson and Wang2, Page, et al.3, Tomlinson4, and Stefanko5, the human factors that might affect mining productivity are: