I THINK MINING

Just arrived on my desk is the CostMine Mexican Mine Wages, Salaries & Benefits 2013 Survey Results.  This sixty-two page document is chock-full of data on wages and salaries at Mexican mines.  I recommend that you and your company or union get a copy and compare your income to the ranges and averages documented here. 

I could not possibly summarize it all in one blog posting—or two or three.  Let us here take a brief look at Mexican Mine salaries.  Here is a poor copy of one of the tables in the Survey.  It lists annual salaries by years of experience for mining engineers at Mexican mine.   We can summarize the table by noting an average salary for starting mining engineers of $22,800 rising to a range of $65,000 to $100,000 by the time they have at least ten years of experience.  Note how Canadian mining engineers working on Mexican mines do far better than Mexican mining engineers working on Mexican mines.

Environmental managers at Mexican mines do reasonably well.  Here are average annual salaries by years of experience for Mexican environmental managers at Mexican mines:

• 1 – 5 = $34,200
• 16 – 20 = $91,200
• 21 – 25 = $144,000

Not sure how it is that they appear to get more than mining engineers of equivalent experience.  Maybe this is a quirk of the small sample size.   To test this hypothesis, I list the average salaries for selected professional positions:

• General Manager = =$151K
• Exploration Manager = $150K
• Engineering Manager = $129K
• Engineering Superintendent = $81K
• Metallurgical Manager = $55K
• Mining Engineer = $46K
• Civil Engineer = $23K
• Geologist = $54K
• Environmental Manager = $98K

What makes you think that civil engineers are grossly underpaid, mining engineers merely adequately paid, and maybe environmental engineers are overpaid.  How times have changed if this is all correct–once we civils and mining engineers were at the top of the salary pile, now we are the bottom.