Mine owners ravage West Coast Tasmania
By Dave Andrews
ROSEBERY — Three of West Coast Tasmania's major mines are facing bleak prospects as management and financial backers threaten mass sackings, back-breaking roster changes and possible closures to boost profits.
The 100-year-old Mt Lyell copper mine in Queenstown has been in the hands of an administrator because Citibank has refused vital funding for the mine's continued operation. Secret negotiations between prospective new owners, the state government and the administrator are continuing over new work practices.
Fifty kilometres to the north, at the Pasminco silver-zinc mine here, management has refused to rule out retrenchments.
On January 12, sackings began at the tin mine at Renison Bell, between Queenstown and Rosebery. More than 80 miners, contractors and staff have lost their jobs over the past four months.
Twenty miners were individually taken from underground at 3am, told they we were no longer required and given 10 minutes to get off the site. Some of those sacked had worked in the mine for 16 years as part of Renison's permanent work force.
The aim of the Renison managers is to savagely reduce the permanent work force and use contractors and casual employees instead. They also want to introduce continuous shift rosters to boost the rate of production from a smaller work force.
The sackings and shift changes at Renison Bell are having an immediate and drastic impact on the mining town of Zeehan, where most of the miners live. Unemployment is already rife, particularly amongst the young, and there is little prospect of work anywhere else in this mining community.
Many sacked miners are now facing the prospect of leaving the state in search of work, which will affect demand for local services and small businesses. Families with generations of experience in mining on the West Coast are being torn apart.
The new shift rosters imposed by the Renison mine's owner, Murchison United, will also have a devastating impact on the community. The new seven-day, 11½-hour shifts will not only harm the health and safety of the remaining miners, but will severely disrupt the social life of the town. Sporting clubs face closure, and many families are shifting to the north of the state to avoid the inevitable cutbacks in government and business services.
According to miners at Renison Bell, the response from the new Labor state government has been appalling. Murchison United claims that at dinner with Premier Jim Bacon and mines minister Paul Lennon the night before the axe fell, Bacon accepted the cuts to the work force and its plans to make the mine "economically viable".
There has been no government response to the sackings, nor visits to Zeehan by any minister to help the mining community face the retrenchments. The state government's response has been exactly the same as previous Liberal governments — statements regretting job losses but accepting the mine owners' right to "rationalise" the mines.
The three major unions covering the mines' work force, the Australian Workers Union, the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union and the Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union, won a temporary reprieve in the Industrial Commission. Arguing that the method of sacking the miners contravened the Workplace Relations Act, the unions forced Renison to place those it sacked back on its books for a month, although these miners are not allowed to enter the mine site.
Management at Renison has been forced to consult with the unions on the necessity of the sackings and roster changes, and how many are required for work, under the terms of the Workplace Relations Act.
Ian Jamieson, a casual at Renison for some three years who has not been given the sack, told Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly he was sceptical about the unions' intervention. "Although they may have won a month's pay for my mates who were sacked, I find it hard to believe they will win the jobs back if the unions accept the rules laid down by the Workplace Relations Act", he said.
"The Workplace Relations Act is Reith's creation, and you can't use his laws against bosses wielding the big stick, no matter how crudely and bluntly they swing the axe."
Jamieson is also concerned that there is little room to fight against the new roster system and Renison's reliance on casuals and contractors if the unions try to campaign on purely legal grounds.
"The new shift rosters mean a direct pay cut for most casuals, in my case by 20%. On top of this, I'm expected to work 80 hours a week when I'm underground and lose every second weekend slaving for Renison Bell."
Jamieson told Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly that the unions should launch a joint campaign between the workers and the community so as to involve everybody affected by Renison's action.
"This can go a long way in overcoming the problem of a severely weakened union movement on the West Coast. By involving women, unemployed and employed miners and the wider community, a lot more pressure can be placed on mine management and the government to guarantee jobs.
"A government genuinely committed to protecting the interests of the workers and the community would step in and take the mines from the mine owners, who have consistently used the need to make huge profits to justify savage attacks on our communities. After all, tens of millions of taxpayers' dollars have already been used in the past decades to prop up the Mt Lyell mine, and yet the mine bosses still threaten to close the mine down."