Peer-Led Safety Culture Takes Hold at Codelco’s Riskiest Mine

Standard corporate safety runs top-down. A rulebook lands from head office, supervisors sign off, and the paperwork declares the site compliant. Underground, in a copper mine where contractors handle the highest-risk tasks, that model has a well-documented failure point: workers who do not own the safety system tend to route around it.

A fundamentally different approach was tested this month at operations tied to one of the world’s largest copper divisions.

On 21 September 2026, mining services group Veltis Latam held its safety recognition ceremony in Santiago, and the design broke deliberately from the usual template. The workers being honoured were not chosen by management. They were chosen by their own coworkers.

The event puts a concrete example on the table for anyone assessing how mining safety culture actually forms at the coalface, where compliance either becomes a lived habit or stays on paper.

This piece gives you a clear framework for evaluating how major mining contractors are restructuring their safety protocols to protect workers and hold operations open, and why that restructuring matters against a national fatality record that makes the stakes plain.

Shifting away from top-down compliance mandates

The Santiago ceremony, led by Chief Executive Officer Marcelo Ocampo and Vice President of People and Culture Karen Gutierrez, honoured 23 contract worker representatives. What separates this edition from a standard corporate awards evening is who did the selecting.

Each of the 23 was nominated by peers, not by supervisors or head office. That single design choice moves the source of authority on safety from the org chart to the crew.

Ocampo framed the logic in operational terms rather than sentimental ones.

“Operational continuity is built at the worksite level, through teams that protect one another and anticipate hazards, not through administrative declarations,” said Marcelo Ocampo, Chief Executive Officer.

The read you should take from that is direct. When a company states that continuity is built at the worksite through crews anticipating hazards, it is telling you that uptime and safety are the same problem, and that both are solved by the people doing the work rather than the people writing the memos.

Gutierrez anchored the human side, stating that the ultimate purpose of every operational task is returning workers safely to their families.

For investors and industry professionals, the mechanism matters more than the ceremony. A crew that owns its safety norms reports hazards earlier and reverts to informal risk assessment less often, which is precisely the behaviour that prevents the kind of incident that halts production.

Peer selection is not a soft gesture. It is an attempt to build the reporting reflex that keeps a high-risk operation running, and that is why it belongs in your assessment of contractor risk rather than in the human resources footnotes.

How frontline initiatives are evaluated and rewarded

Alongside the recognition ceremony, Veltis Latam ran a formal competition to surface safety ideas that originated in the field rather than in a policy office. The scale gives the exercise weight: 22 submissions arrived from 16 different contracts.

From that pool, five initiatives were distinguished. Three took winner status and two received honourable mentions, each addressing concrete risk prevention or improvements to working conditions with the stated aim of being replicable across other sites.

The proposals were assessed against five criteria:

1. Innovation
2. Overall impact
3. Effectiveness
4. Risk anticipation
5. Long-term sustainability

What that criteria list tells you is that the company is treating field-sourced ideas as an operational asset to be scaled, not as a suggestion box. Risk anticipation and long-term sustainability sitting on the scorecard signal a preference for measures that prevent incidents before they occur and hold up over time.

On the same day, the Asociación Chilena de Seguridad (ACHS), Chile’s principal workplace safety body, recognised two Veltis Latam operating companies, Steel and Berliam, for sustained prevention at Codelco’s El Teniente Division.

The bar for that recognition is where the hard benchmarking lives. Under ACHS criteria, a contract must score 90% or more on the evaluation checklist, record zero lost-time accidents, carry no accidents with permanent consequences and no high-potential incidents over the preceding 12 months, and fully comply with the Paso Cero programme and current legal standards.

Those thresholds show you exactly how operators are currently defining contractor excellence: a near-perfect audit score paired with a clean incident record. For anyone weighing a contractor’s operational reliability, that combination is a tangible benchmark rather than a marketing claim.

The systemic contractor risk driving this change

Strip away the ceremony and the reason this cultural shift matters becomes stark. Chilean mining recorded 15 fatal accidents in 2025, matching the highest annual toll since 2018, and contractors bore the heavier share.

Of those 15 deaths, 8 were contractor workers and 7 were direct employees of mining companies, according to Sernageomin data reported by Okto and corroborated by Revista Minera. Contractors dying at a higher rate than direct staff, despite often making up a smaller share of a site’s workforce, points to a structural problem rather than bad luck.

The pattern is not confined to Chile. The International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM), a global industry body, reported that contractors accounted for 45% of total fatalities across member companies in 2024, down from 69% in 2023 but still disproportionate.

Analysts and safety commentators trace this to what Calama en Línea calls externalización del riesgo, or risk outsourcing. When a host company delegates critical functions to contractors, it cedes direct control over safety and work quality, leaving crews under cost and schedule pressure with fragmented oversight and weaker integration into the host’s safety systems.

That disproportionate fatality rate reveals a structural vulnerability sitting inside mining portfolios. It is why a peer-led programme deserves tracking as a leading indicator of operational stability, not as a public relations line.

The safety innovation gap between programme design and measurable fatality reduction is a documented tension in the sector; new initiatives routinely outpace the cultural adoption rates needed to shift incident trends at the site level.

Addressing the El Teniente risk profile

The El Teniente Division carries a record that makes the recent ACHS awards there particularly loaded. Codelco recorded 21 workplace fatalities between 2018 and 2025, and 10 of those occurred at El Teniente, according to Calama en Línea.

The severity peaked with the 31 July 2025 collapse at the division, described as the world’s largest underground copper mine, which killed six workers. That single event accounted for 40% of all Chilean mining deaths in 2025.

The El Teniente accident investigation examined how structural conditions inside the world’s largest underground copper mine created cascading risk exposure that standard compliance frameworks had not resolved.

Codelco’s fatality rate across that 2018 to 2025 window ran at 0.81 per 10,000 workers, nearly six times the 0.12 ICMM member average. Against that history, a contractor earning a near-perfect safety score at El Teniente is not a routine certificate. It is evidence that the highest-risk ground can be worked to a clean record when the systems and culture hold.

Scaling the peer-led model across high-risk operations

The Veltis Latam event is one company’s edition of a broader idea, but the direction it points is worth holding onto. Regulatory and expert consensus has moved the same way: bodies including the International Labour Organization (ILO), alongside national safety regulators, argue that worker participation in hazard identification improves trust and early reporting more reliably than command-and-control approaches.

Worker participation frameworks that move beyond consultation toward structured peer engagement have shown measurable effects on hazard reporting frequency, an outcome that the ILO and national safety bodies have increasingly cited as the key leading indicator for incident prevention.

That leaves an open question for the sector. If peer-led ownership consistently produces earlier hazard reporting and cleaner records on high-risk ground, contractor safety culture stops being a differentiator and starts becoming a procurement requirement.

For investors, the practical takeaway is to watch whether host operators begin writing peer-led engagement and field-sourced safety metrics into their contracts, because that is where a cultural preference becomes a hard commercial standard.

For readers wanting to understand how technology-driven oversight layers interact with peer-led cultural programmes, our full explainer on mining safety management integration covers how leading operators are combining system-level monitoring with frontline engagement to close the gap between audit scores and actual incident rates.

This article is for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. Investors should conduct their own research and consult with financial professionals before making investment decisions.