Mount Arthur Still Hiring

Filed in Recent News by April 11, 2016

DESPITE BHP announcing they will be slashing 290 jobs at their Mount Arthur operation, contractors are continuing to be hired onto site.

20160408MiningBoots01Peter Jordan, district president of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU), said they have raised their concerns with the Company.

“They’ve been doing it pretty much since the announcement to offload labour and we’ve raised that issue with them before and their response always is to us, ‘well at the moment our labour demand remains as is and the labour hire contractor Chandler Macleod are just replacing people who are leaving'”, said Mr Jordan.

“At the end of the day if they haven’t changed their production mode they need so many bums in seats still at the moment up until they make the retrenchments and if Chandlers are contracted to have x amount of contractors in the workplace with their roster systems then they’re contractually bound to make sure they provide people,” he said.

“It’s only replacing contractor positions,” Peter Jordan said.

The Unions are concerned that open cut examiner (OCE) staff have been forced to read a statement to the rest of the workers stating their own positions will be made redundant in June and seeking expressions of interest for other staff to step into their roles.

“They are basically being made to say ‘I’ve been made redundant and I’m going to finish up in a month or so, do any of you want my job?’ and this is what you have to do,” said Mr Jordan.

“We’ve had our safety guy up there telling the company to do a risk assessment based on the requirement that they have the right ratio of workers to OCE’s,” he said.

“I think what their intentions are is instead of having all OCE’s, they are going to have some OCE’s with step up supervisors working underneath them and our agreement does not permit for that at the moment so we are working our way through that,” Peter Jordan said.

Based on staff in OCE’s being told they will be finishing in June, the Union predict the company will have finalised the cuts across the rest of the workforce by that time.

A total of 334 employees at Mount Arthur put in an expression of interest for a voluntary redundancy.

Due to the high number of applicants the company has asked for another seven days to calculate the entitlements of those employees.

Once those employees have received the value of their redundancies they will have seven days to formalise their request for a voluntary redundancy and then the Union will meet again with the Company.

“We are hopeful there will be enough voluntary redundancies to avoid any permanent employee of Mount Arthur being made forcibly redundant,” said Mr Jordan.

 

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