The Most Beautiful Miners' Day in Banovići: Workers Receive 13th Salary, 200 New Jobs in January

Nearly 3,000 miners from the brown coal mine in Banovići are celebrating one of the most beautiful Miners' Days in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina this year, which is marked on December 21, writes BH news agency Patria (NAP).

Safer Mušanović, president of the Independent Union of Miners in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and president of the union of RMU "Banovići", boasted that the miners from this small mining town in northeastern Bosnia ended the year with a profit of more than three million KM. Because of this, the management rewarded the miners with a vacation allowance and a surplus of about 1,300 KM, and in January next year, the miners will get 200 new colleagues.

- The mine in Banovići is an example of how expertise, patriotism, and a domestic attitude towards the company bring success - says Mušanović for Patria.

- But, above all, the expertise of the personnel managing the mine is important. Coal production is a complex process, which has several dozen phases, before the final coal is obtained. And, it is enough for only one phase to be managed by unskilled people, and for the entire process to suffer. That is not the case with us.

The mines in Banovići were founded in 1946, shortly after the end of World War II, more precisely after the completion of the Brčko - Banovići Youth Railway, and originally bore the name "Tito", after the president of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito.

In the first year, the mines had fewer than 696 employees and a production of 97,412 tons of coal. A year later, the number of workers was reduced to 462, and annual production increased to 491.42 tons of coal.

After the procurement of new excavators and the intensification of surface exploitation in 1982, the number of employees increased to 3,635, and annual production reached 2,392,705 tons of coal, and this was the highest production in the history of the mine in the 1990s.

Until 1991, production stagnated, and the number of employees increased to 3,835 workers. At the beginning of the aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina, the number of employees began to drastically decrease, and in the first war year, annual production fell to 938,670 tons with a tendency for further decline, to end the post-war years with 317,089 tons. During the war period, the mines in Banovići operated within the RU "Tuzla". The epilogue of the four-year war production of 1,742,248 tons was fatal: devastated production capacities, a depleted deposit, unsettled debts for undelivered quantities of coal exceeding 12 million KM.

After the war, production recorded growth, but it is evident that joint work under the auspices of RU "Tuzla" represented a serious obstacle to consolidation and development. At the end of 1998, the Mine separated and continued to operate as RMU "Banovići". Soon, with the help of the then Government of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, it purchased five state-of-the-art dump trucks. Production grew, first to one million in 2001, then to 1.2 million in 2002, and nearly 1.3 million a year later.

In 2004, a new page in the history of the Mine opened. At the end of May, the first Shareholders' Assembly was held, at which a decision was made on organizational transformation into a joint-stock company, whereby the state became the owner of 69.3% of the company's capital, and small shareholders 30.7% of the capital.

RMU "Banovići" ends the business year with record production of 1,328,169 tons of separated coal and a record overburden removal of 7,791,529 cubic meters of solid mass. The final account also shows a record profit of 4.7 million KM. The achieved results in production, overburden removal, economic and financial operations, regular salaries for employees, and the allocated 2.5 million KM for equipment procurement, rank the Company among the most successful in the branch of the BH economy.

- On the occasion of Miners' Day, we want other mines in Bosnia and Herzegovina to operate as well as the mine in Banovići - said Mušanović, writes Patria.