On the 18th local time, we visited Güemes in Salta Province, Argentina. As we entered the middle of a desolate plain, a scene came into view of POSCO Argentina and China's Ganfeng Lithium plants facing each other across a narrow road. Both are plants that process lithium extracted from salt lakes in the Andes highlands.
In this area, competition is underway not only for mining rights but also to secure people to run the plants. It is common to recruit skilled employees by offering 1.5 times, or as much as twice, their existing pay.
Lithium is a key raw material for electric vehicles and energy storage system (ESS) batteries for artificial intelligence (AI) data centers. In northwestern Argentina, where salt lakes rich in dissolved lithium are clustered, production facilities of global corporations are steadily moving in. In Salta Province alone, over the past two years, plants by France's Eramet, POSCO, and Ganfeng Lithium have gone into operation one after another.
Plants have expanded quickly, but hiring skilled workers has not kept pace. A POSCO Argentina official said, "Even when building the plant, it was not easy to find technicians we could entrust with simple welding or bolting."
The working environment is also demanding. The site where lithium feedstock is pumped up from the salt lake and concentrated sits at about 4,000 meters above sea level. With oxygen in the air at about 60% of sea-level levels, employees go through high-altitude acclimation and typically live and work at the field camp for two weeks at a time.
In such harsh conditions, experienced workers who have adapted and learned lithium processes are, from the perspective of companies trying to run new plants, valuable talent who can be deployed immediately. One expatriate at POSCO Argentina said, "We hired with difficulty and taught for over a year, but after completing training, it was common for them to move to competitors, which was frustrating."
It is also hard to bring in employees from outside. The Salta Province Mining Promotion Law requires mining corporations and subcontractors to give hiring priority to residents of the mining area and Salta Province, filling more than 60% of their workforce. The aim is to ensure that mine development leads to local jobs. The structure forces competition over a limited local labor pool.
In this situation, POSCO chose "education." Last month, it opened a vocational training facility called the Tech Center inside the downstream processing plant in Güemes. It is said to be the first time a mining company has set up a training site directly in this area.
Employees of POSCO and Korean corporations operating locally stepped in as instructors, and students competing for first and second place at nearby technical schools were selected to learn for two weeks using on-site automation equipment, covering pipe fabrication, welding, and electrical terminations. The top trainee shed tears upon receiving a certificate. The response was so strong that local school principals and the Salta Province vice minister of education visited the plant's training site, surprising the employees who were teaching.
From Argentina's standpoint, it is welcome when resource development by foreign corporations does not stop at extraction and shipment but leads to local technology accumulation and jobs. For POSCO Argentina, the thicker the local pool of skilled workers becomes, the easier it will be to find people to operate the plants going forward.
Even if you secure lithium mining rights and spend trillions of won to build a plant, it is hard to ramp up production if there are not enough people to run it stably. POSCO Argentina says that of its 623 employees, 560 are local hires. Since the number of expatriates cannot be increased indefinitely, training local employees to the manager level is also an important task.
How to select and develop reliable employees, and how well they are retained, is becoming another battleground in the resource race among countries around Argentina's salt lakes.