Shareholder Employment at Red Dog Mine

Under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, Iñupiat of northwest Alaska organized as shareholders in the NANA1 Regional Corporation, Inc., and received title to 2,258,836 acres, including rights to the rich Red Dog zinc deposit. In 1982, NANA signed a joint-venture agreement with Teck2 to develop the mine, including provisions for preferential hire for qualified NANA shareholders. The agreement aimed for 100% shareholder hire by 2001. As of 2010, Teck had 220 NANA shareholders in full-time employment, which is 53 percent of the workforce. Other mines around the world have similar indigenous or local hire agreements with mixed success. The Voisey’s Bay mine sets the high mark for Canada with an Aboriginal hire rate of 54 percent (AETG 2008), followed by Ekati diamond mine at 50 percent (BHP Billiton 2011). So the track record for indigenous employment at Red Dog is high by global standards, although it falls short of NANA and Teck’s goal. What are the continuing barriers to increasing shareholder hire, retention and promotion

Quasi-Isometric Embeddings of Symmetric Spaces

We prove a rigidity theorem that shows that, under many circumstances, quasi-isometric embeddings of equal rank, higher rank symmetric spaces are close to isometric embeddings. We also produce some surprising examples of quasi-isometric embeddings of higher rank symmetric spaces. In particular, we produce embeddings of $SL(n,\mathbb R)$ into $Sp(2(n-1),\mathbb R)$ when no isometric embeddings exist. A key ingredient in our proofs of rigidity results is a direct generalization of the Mostow-Morse Lemma in higher rank. Typically this lemma is replaced by the quasi-flat theorem which says that maximal quasi-flat is within bounded distance of a finite union of flats. We improve this by showing that the quasi-flat is in fact flat off of a subset of codimension $2$.Comment: Exposition improved, outlines of proofs added to introduction. Typos corrected, references added. Also some discussion of the reducible case adde