4 April, 2012
Week-long strikes at seven Queensland, Australia, metallurgical coal mines ended today, but a dogged 16-month labour dispute between three ICEM union affiliates there and the BHP Billiton-Mitsubishi Alliance (BMA) continues. On 27 March, just when progress was being made on a new version of an enterprise labour agreement after two weeks of steady talks, BMA reneged on pivotal language, causing the latest round of protected industrial actions.
For the 3,500 miners of Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU), the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union (AMWU), and the Electrical Trades Union of Communications, Electrical, Plumbing Union (CEPU), the setback means they are no closer to a collective agreement under Fair Work Australia than when bargaining began in December 2010.
For BMA, which twice now has rejected the unions’ Single Bargaining Unit (SBU) offer of third-party mediation, it means more disruption at the world’s largest coking coal mine pits with workers likely to take yet another legal round of stop-work actions next week.
On 2 April, BHP Billiton, the lead operator of the 50/50 joint venture, announced force majeure to customers in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China, India, Latin America and Europe. It informed steel producers that it would be unable to meet its coal-delivery contracts due to the labour disruptions and wet weather in the Bowen Basin of central Queensland.
Management also announced at the outset of last week’s seven-day strike that at the end of April it would again use its Fair Work law privilege to conduct a second mail ballot directly to workers without SBU involvement. The first time it did such, last October, miners rejected the throwback management rights’ proposals by 92%. (See ICEM report here.)
Last week’s failed bargaining saw BMA regress on commitments it made in earlier days and earlier rounds of bargaining over family-friendly work rosters and other language that had been tentatively agreed to in principle. Issues that remain in dispute include the role of unions in safety matters, working hours, housing, and inequality for contract workers.
On the company’s backtracking, the strike leader of the largest union representing BMA miners, CFMEU Queensland District President Stephen Smyth said, “The level of contempt they’re showing for their workers is truly astonishing.”
Stephen Smyth
That contempt rests in the belief that BHP Billiton believes it can cling to one-sided work rules common in the dead-and-gone WorkChoices legislation of pre-2009. The contempt toward miners and current Australian labour law is also evident in a leaked early March e-mail from BHP Billiton Coal Division CEO Marcus Randolph. In it, he told his Bowen Basin mine managers “this is the fight we had to have” and the work-rule issues in dispute “are not negotiable, not now, not next month and not next year.”
Meantime, with BMA’s seven Queensland mines that produce one-fifth of the world’s metallurgical coal, prices are soaring and the ripple effect from Australia’s nastiest labour dispute in decades is being felt in rail and seaborne transport, and in steel-making centres across the globe.
(An ICEM report on SBU strikes from February 2012 can be found here.)