Miners from global giant Barrick Gold to small-cap Golden Star Resources are grappling with the same dilemma as the gold rout deepens: how to reign in labour costs without sacrificing too much output and revenue.

Barrick is looking at how to do “more with less” as it targets $2-billion in spending cuts, co-president James Gowans told analysts last week. Toronto-based Golden Star is working to reduce labour costs further, while Kinross Gold, Yamana Gold and Newmont Mining are also reviewing headcounts as prices hover around five-year lows.

“It’s everything, it’s holistic, it isn’t one particular area,” says Golden Star CEO Sam Coetzer in an interview. “That’s just the nature of the game.”

The industry has already reduced its workforce by more than a third since 2012, when gold was trading about 30% above today’s levels, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. While gold is unlikely to witness the kind of mass firings seen in harder-hit industries, such as coal and oil, more cuts may be coming, with labour accounting for as much as half their expenses.

“They really are trying to cut to the bone,” says Kenneth Hoffman, a mining analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence. “The next step is the mines themselves, and that will be the next big wave of cuts.”

Cutbacks so far have included corporate office staff and local contractors, says Omar Jabara, a spokesperson for Newmont.

While there is still room to cut corporate jobs, companies cannot go “very far” with reducing mineworkers, says Pawel Rajszel, an analyst at Veritas Investment Research, in Toronto.

“If they still want to mine at the mines, it’s hard to imagine how they are going to achieve that,” Rajszel says. “Unless they start bringing in robots.”

In Ghana, Golden Star has opted to close its refractory business to focus on easier-to-process deposits, says Coetzer. The company plans to cut 300 jobs in the next quarter and is looking to further reduce expenses, including on exploration and suppliers, he says.

Workers are paying the price of a commodity rout as a slowdown in Chinese demand fans oversupply concerns. Prices for raw materials measured by the Bloomberg Commodity Index dropped to the lowest since 2002 this month.

Glen Mpufane, director of mining at IndustriALL Global Union, which represents about 50-million workers in the mining, energy and manufacturing sectors across the globe, says wage reductions would be a more “responsible” alternative to dismissals. However, few companies are considering that.

This is because negotiations can be a complex process that might not always save jobs, according to Hoffman.

“Sometimes the unions will say flatly ’No’ because they know that if they take a wage cut, everyone will have to take a wage cut,” Hoffman says.

Wage talks in South Africa are perhaps the most telling example, he adds. The country’s largest miners have been locked in negotiations with worker unions for more than a month, trying to avoid slashing 10 000 jobs as companies grapple with the higher costs and plunging prices for their output.