Management: Foundations & Applications, 1st edition
Human resource management
Argyle shifts to locals in preference to FIFO workers
Transcript
Presenter: More and more people are leaving their regular lives to join the fly-in, fly-out army. At last count there were more than 50 000 FIFO workers in Western Australia but not every company is filling aircraft up with contractors and employees. The Argyle Diamond Mine, one of the first fly-in, fly-out mine sites in Western Australia, has shifted its focus to employing locals, just like the good old days.
Claire Nichols reports.
Claire Nichols: It’s five in the morning at Argyle Diamond Mine and the workers that camp here are fed and ready for their day. This is Australia’s largest diamond mine, producing about a third of the world’s supply. 25 years ago it was also one of the first fly-in fly-out mine sites in Australia and a young Kelly Dasborough took the first of hundreds of plane trips to the Kimberley.
Kelly Dasborough: We used to sit at the airport and if a plane took off it was like ‘wow, look at that, a plane!’ whereas today they come and go every couple of minutes.
Claire Nichols: For a quarter of a century Kelly Dasborough has braved the three and a half hour commute to and from the site and progressed from being a truck driver to the superintendent of the open pit mine. Every week he leaves his wife and two children in Perth and is always back home in time for the weekend.
Kelly Dasborough: That’s all they’ve ever known so they know that I go to work and come home and that’s my home time.
Claire Nichols: But workers like Kelly Dasborough are becoming a rare breed at Argyle. Of 500 employees just over 100 are fly-in fly-out.
Shane Johnson (General Manager, Operations): We started off as a FIFO mine, and as you pointed out that it was one of the first, and now we’re actually in a position where over 70% of our workforce is actually local and residential in the east Kimberley. So it’s been a big transition away from that and we’ve done that almost at a time when a lot of other sites are transitioning to FIFO workforce.
Claire Nichols: Around WA the number of FIFO workers is on the rise. At a typical mining work site about 52% of employees are fly-in fly-out. When a project is in the construction phase the percentage is even higher. With new projects ramping up around the state there’s expected to be a blowout in FIFO numbers in the next few years. The Chamber of Minerals and Energy says the work practice is simply the preferred for many West Australians.
Reg Howard-Smith (Chamber of Minerals and Energy): If a all body has a roughly short period of life, it’s remote, then it lends itself to fly-in fly-out. But I think what is also happening is that within that family unit that’s changed dramatically over the last 20 years. So it suits from that point of view, the modern family unit.
Claire Nichols: But as more people turn to FIFO there’s a growing chorus of people questioning its effects on families, health and communities. A federal government committee is running an inquiry into the fly-in fly-out model and its effect on regional towns. It’s a concern that Argyle is all too aware of, prompting its transition to a local workforce.
Shane Johnson:We believe that having our employees in the Kimberley is a really important way in which we can add that contribution to the development — socio and economic development — within the east Kimberley.
Claire Nichols: Is it more cost effective to employ locally?
Shane Johnson: Well, we believe so. We believe that not only does it have benefits in the east Kimberley but also we see lower turnover with staff.
Claire Nichols: Rhys Jenkins is one of the workers who made the move to Kununurra to work for Argyle.
Rhys Jenkins: We moved here and set up a little nest, bought a house, got a dog, got some chickens so we’re loving life in Kununurra.
Claire Nichols: The company believes workers who live close to the mine site are more likely to be loyal to the company.
Shane Johnson: For them, to make a decision to actually go and work somewhere else is a very difficult one. For a FIFO employee they can just jump on a different plane.
Claire Nichols: And soon it seems workers might not need to jump on a plane at all. In a couple of years this operation will shift underground and the open pit mine will start to be rehabilitated. This won’t only mean a massive change in the landscape but a major shift in the way the workforce operates here at Argyle.
This underground mine is expected to extend the life of Argyle by at least another eight years. Right now, it’s still being constructed but when it’s complete it will operate in a very different way with no people required underground to operate the machinery.
Shane Johnson: They actually have joysticks in front of them and what they do is they set up the loads and they set up them up on their runs.
Claire Nichols: And they can do that from anywhere?
Shane Johnson: Basically from anywhere they like.
Claire Nichols: In this case the operators will work from the Kimberley but in this brave new world of mining where mines can be operated from thousands of kilometres away it seems the need for a fly-in fly-out workforce could be even further reduced.
Reg Howard-Smith: It could, and I suppose to some extent it’s going to, and we see control operators jobs, for example, moving out of remote areas into the Perth metropolitan area. But it’s a long way away before we actually go to start replacing significant numbers of people in the resource sector.
Claire Nichols: For fly-in fly-out worker Kelly Dasborough who runs the open pit mine the shift to new underground technology will probably mean the end of his time at Argyle.
Kelly Dasborough: Either it’ll be a transfer to the underground or, more than likely, look at going to another Rio Tinto site, or completely new.
Claire Nichols: So, as these miners start the long flight home the question is whether one day it could be for good.
Presenter: Claire Nichols reporting from the Kimberley there.