MOUNT Arthur coal mine was one of the Hunter Valley’s biggest when it opened in 2001 with approval to extract 15 million tonnes of coal for the next 21 years.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
or signup to continue reading
This move to casual work is a deliberate business strategy to make workers more compliant.
- Peter Jordan, CFMEU
Today, after various modifications to its operating conditions, it has approval to extract 32 million tonnes of coal a year, with another five years of mine life, taking it to 2026.
In the 2015 financial year, it reported run-of-mine production of 25.2 million tonnes, which came down to 19.7 million tonnes of saleable coal, after the raw product went through the coal washery.
Figures released last week by BHP Billiton show production of 17.1 million tonnes of saleable coal in the year to June 30, a fall of almost 15 per cent over the previous financial year.
BHP is in a reporting “blackout” period until its next set of financial results are released on August 16, but the company’s NSW energy coal business – which operates the mine – reported a pre-tax loss of $US9 million (about $11.6 million) for the six months to the end of December.
Like other coal companies, BHP has been doing whatever it can to cut costs in a market where prices have more than halved since 2011, to the point where many – but not all – NSW coal mines are finding it hard to make money.
When the cost-cutting began, the Newcastle Herald reported that suppliers to the mines were being told to cut their prices by 20 per cent or more more if they wanted to keep the business.
With most mineworkers still belonging to the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, employers turned increasingly to contract labour to drive down their operational costs.
BHP denies it has targets for the ratio of permanent to casual employees at Mount Arthur, but as the Herald reported late last year, a BHP “labour strategy” document that surfaced in a court case with the CFMEU, showed the company was planning to have 40 per cent of the mine’s workforce employed as casuals by 2017.
The company says that document is out of date, but CFMEU district president Peter Jordan says he has no doubt that BHP has a deliberate policy to extend its casual workforce at the expense of permanent employees.
“This move to casual work is in fact a deliberate business strategy to make workers more compliant and less able to fight for decent pay and entitlements,” Mr Jordan said. “The companies know that casual workers can be fired at a moment’s notice, meaning they are less likely to stand up for their rights. Casual workers in the mining industry have less job security, poorer working conditions and less social protection, but perhaps the biggest problem is that casual workers tend not to speak up about safety issues, for fear of losing their jobs.”
The main BHP contractor, Chandler Macleod, replaced the previous operator, Tesa, in late 2014. Tesa workers were offered a job with Chandler, but payslips show the rate was $6 an hour less.
Simon Turner, the injured Chandler employee featured in Tuesday’s Herald, said he started work in the coal industry in 2012 for a career change. He accepted work with a contract company as a way of “getting a foot in the door”. He knew the pay was less than for full-time mine workers and was agitating for improvements at Mount Arthur in 2015 when the CFMEU – he says in an about-face – recommended that its members vote for an agreement it had previously criticised.
Mr Jordan has a different perspective, saying the Chandler Macleod Northern District of NSW Black Coal Mining Agreement signed in June 2015 won back $3 an hour that the workers had lost the year before. That equated to an extra $133 a week, and Chandler also agreed to back-pay the $3 an hour to the previous September.
Mr Turner said it was a bad agreement, because as Mr Jordan has now confirmed, contractors were still earning 30 per cent to 40 per cent less than their BHP counterparts on the same crew, doing the same work. But the permanents are also under pressure. Mr Jordan confirmed a new enterprise agreement with BHP contains no pay rise for the first 12 months, followed by an increase of 2 per cent a year in the second and third years – a very modest outcome compared with boom-time agreements.
As to the size of the workforce, BHP said on Tuesday that the mine employed about 1500 people of whom “fewer than 200” were “office-based” employees. Records show 273 Chandler workers voted on the union agreement, and Mr Turner says there are more now at the mine.
He says there is nothing “casual” about the job.
“As I have explained to the mining inspectorate, to the Fair Work Ombudsman, to the union, to the company, to anyone who asks me, our rosters are set a year in advance,” Mr Turner said this week.
“We work 12 ½ hour shifts, the shortest week we work is 38 hours. How can we possibly be classed as casuals?”
Despite such concerns, Fair Work Australia signed off on the Chandler/CFMEU agreement, deciding it passed a legislative standard known as the “better off overall test” – usually called the BOOT test.
But for Mr Turner and others, including Greens MLC David Shoebridge, who has followed the situation for some time, the question is how casual employment was allowed in NSW coal mining in the first place, given a belief, which the CFMEU had previously promoted, that it was not “lawful”.
Tomorrow: The vexed status of casual employment in NSW mines.
