Some people wonder whether the miners are trying. Mr. Farkas said no miner took him up on his job offer. But their requests for money keep rolling in.

He said he “felt taken advantage of” by Claudio Yáñez, a miner for whom he bought a house worth $63,500, at least twice as much as he would usually pay for a worker’s house. Mr. Farkas said that he wanted to give him a less expensive house, as he had done for his own employees, but that Mr. Yáñez used a television crew to press him to buy the costly one.

“I did plenty for the miners; now they have to do it on their own,” Mr. Farkas said.

Mr. Yáñez, 35, denied taking advantage of Mr. Farkas, who he said gave him the house “from his heart.”

He said he used a cash gift from Mr. Farkas to “completely furnish” the two-story home. But he has not worked since the rescue. “We are in really bad shape; we don’t have work, and no one wants to hire us,” he said.

Much has changed in Chile since August 2010, when the miners were trapped after a gold-and-copper mine collapsed, only to be all discovered alive 17 days later. Their inspiring struggle to survive motivated Chile’s president, Sebastián Piñera, to show the world that his country was at once compassionate and capable.

After a determined effort that cost millions of dollars, workers rescued all 33 miners last Oct. 13. The popularity of Mr. Piñera’s government soared. He took maximum advantage, traveling around the world with the note in which a miner had first signaled that they were alive. But this year, amid months of protests about educational and environmental policies, the president’s ratings have dropped to their lowest levels since he took office.

Despite criticism by politicians and some miners that Mr. Piñera has not done enough for them, the government recently gave $500-a-month pensions to 14 miners (the oldest and those with the most serious physical problems). But they were less than half of what most earned as miners.