IN August this year, BHP's Scottish chief executive Andrew Mackenzie was on the front cover of the Australian Financial Review's "BOSS" magazine, with a long article inside lauding him as a "prominent voice for social change".
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BHP has prospered under Mackenzie, a geologist with a PhD in organic chemistry who has deliberately moved to reposition the company as a more "moral and ethical" operator since taking the top job in 2013, having joined BHP from Rio Tinto in 2007.
BOSS quoted him as telling a Barcelona investors' conference in May that: "We really do seek to make a valuable contribution to society as a whole, and particularly to the communities where we operate, because without this contribution we don't believe we can create value for our shareholders."
The second half of the sentence is certainly true: BHP's results for the year to June 30 included an EBITDA (earnings before tax and depreciation, described as the company's "key measure" of performance) of $US23.1 billion, or $35 billion in Australian money at recent exchange rates.
Its headline result - an "underlying attributable profit" of $US9.1 billion ($13.6 billion) - was more modest, but Mackenzie also pointed to the $US20.9 billion ($31.2 billion) it was returning to shareholders this year.
I mention the Mackenzie article because I had included it in last week's questions to BHP, noting that it seemed in "such contrast" to what had been reported about Mount Arthur since 2016.
Unfortunately, I now have to correct that date. The first Newcastle Herald article on the discontent among casual mine workers there was on May 27, 2015.
That report described how contract mine workers at Mount Arthur and elsewhere were earning as little as $80,000 a year for doing the same work on the same shifts that were earning their directly employed colleagues as much as $150,000. As "casuals", they were also lacking conditions, including holiday pay and sick pay. Having switched to Chandler Macleod the previous July to "reduce costs and improve efficiency", it referred our questions to the new contractor, which said it was a matter for BHP.
The CFMEU's responded by criticising the Herald's reporting, and disputing the size of the gap between the two groups of workers.
There's been no incentive for anyone to blow the whistle on anything
- Mine worker and One Nation candidate Stuart Bonds
In July 2016, we looked at the situation again, this time through the eyes of an injured Chandler Macleod employee, Simon Turner, who began to ring the bell on what he describes as a toxic and unlawful culture that treats healthy workers and injured ones alike: as the enemy. In going public about the "unbelievable things" he has discovered, he's become a go-to person for other mine workers injured or ill-treated while working for Chandler's and other labour hire firms.
By February last year, a hard-nosed UK litigation funding firm and its barristers had looked at the Mount Arthur situation from every angle and was confident enough to provide a relatively obscure Canberra law firm up to $4.5 million to run a Federal Court class action against Chandler Macleod and BHP that has since widened with aims of recovering as $50 million allegedly owed to hundreds of workers.
The Adero class action is based on the reasoning that an enterprise agreement cannot contravene - and must improve on - the award it is based on. The Black Coal Mining Industry allows only specified staff, not mine workers, to be employed as casuals.
Despite the adverse publicity, and with the class action working its way steadily through the pre-trial stages, it appears as though little, if anything, has changed at Mount Arthur. During 2018, as it had since 2015, neither BHP nor Chandler Macleod were inclined to answer questions in any detail.
Little has been heard, either, from the insurers and regulators overseeing the industry, as One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts alleged a fortnight ago at Senate estimates committee hearings in Canberra.
The CFMEU responded the next day by criticising Senator Roberts, telling its members he had "made some bizarre claims . . . about casualisation in coal mining and the role of the union".
Hunter Labor MP Joel Fitzgibbon says he's been "acutely aware" of the casuals issue for some time, but says Roberts "risks creating a distraction from the main game".
Some of the senator's concerns relate to the way that the CFMEU and the employer group, the Minerals Council of NSW, were given legislated joint control in 2002 of "the assets, rights and liabilities" of the Joint Coal Board - the government organisation that oversaw the industry from 1947.
As well, the CFMEU had been directly involved in labour hire, forming a company called United Mining Support Services, generally known as UMSS, in the 1990s.
Both situations came about for laudable reasons. The CFMEU's half-share in the coal board's replacement organisation, Coal Services, and its various subsidiaries, was supposed to keep otherwise rampant employers in check.
UMSS was created as a non-profit way to provide employment for union members injured on the job, with any surplus used to provide education scholarships for the children of CFMEU members. In 2004, UMSS was sold to a labour hire firm called TESA, but in 2013 the Australian Financial Review revealed that the northern district (or Hunter branch) of the union had kept a 7.8 per cent stake until 2006, when TESA was sold to another labour hire operator, the Skilled group, for $62 million. The union's share of the sale had "apparently gone to charity for distressed miners".
It was TESA that Chandler Macleod replaced at Mount Arthur in 2014 when BHP was looking to cut costs.
While the Newcastle Herald is not suggesting there was anything wrong with these transactions, or that any of the union's officials have acted improperly, it's the union's past involvement with labour hire firms, and its continued endorsement of a substantial number of enterprise agreements that set pay and conditions seemingly well below the award, that have left a number of past and present union members to wonder what is happening behind the scenes.
When the Herald asked the union about the issues raised by Senator Roberts, it responded by saying it disagreed with many of the propositions, which drew "a long bow".
"Our union pursues every member's claim that is raised with us, whether they are permanent or a contractor, whether it's bullying or long service leave or injury related," union district president Peter Jordan said. "We have a strong track record in having members reinstated to their jobs, securing lost entitlements and winning compensation. The stronger the union is the more effective we can be in representing mine workers and we encourage all coal miners to join the union and to raise their issues and concerns with us."
Simon Turner says he turned to One Nation after being repeatedly rebuffed by people in both major parties.
"I would talk to people and they would look at the documents and say 'this can't be happening, this can't be happening', and they would promise to do something, but then later on there would be some reason as to why they couldn't," Turner says.
Stuart Bonds, a mine worker and CFMEU member who ran strongly for One Nation against Joel Fitzgibbon at the May federal election, says he was similarly shocked.
He wants to see some sort of independent investigation of the issues raised by Turner and his associates, saying it's the silence, a much as the problems themselves, that stands out.
"A union is a union and coal companies are coal companies," Bonds says.
"Put them together around the table in the way they are here and there's been no incentive for anyone to blow the whistle on anything, and that's what's happened."
Corrine McCarthy, one of the two Mount Arthur casual mineworkers who spoke out in Saturday's Herald, says she shook her head when she read the comments from BHP chief Andrew Mackenzie at the start of this article.
"He's saying they want to do the right thing, but when we get hurt, or stick up for ourselves they treat us like crap," McCarthy says.
"We might be employed by Chandler Macleod, but BHP is running the show, it tells them who stays and who goes. It's a funny way of 'contributing to the local community'."
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