Mining’s secret dirty laundry: almost one in four FIFO miners does hotbedding. And they hate it

HOTBEDDING. Almost one in four FIFO miners do it, and they’re not happy about it. One female miner shares her story.

SCENARIO ONE:

YOU come home after a long, dirty 12-hour shift in the mines to the comfort of your own crisp white sheets.

Except you don’t. You actually return to a bed which someone else has been sleeping in while you’ve been hard at work. Twelve hours later, your bed will be theirs again. So it goes for an undisclosed number of the fly-in fly-out (FIFO) miners in Australia.

But anecdotal evidence combined with a new Essential Research poll called the Commuting Mineworks Survey suggest the number is increasing.

SCENARIO TWO:

You work for a company for many years, the same job, the same mine. You’re a trusted, reliable employee. Your swing is one week on, one week off. But each time you show up, you get a new room. You can’t leave so much as a towel behind, let alone hang a few pictures or personal effects because when you fly back in a week, you’ll have a totally different room.

Mining companies call this “motelling”. But miners call it …

Fortunately, this particular sheet is actually meant to be brown.

HOTBEDDING

According to statistics in the latest Commuting Mineworkers Survey, hotbedding is a way of life for up to one in four FIFO miners.

In a national survey of 1,046 miners who stay in mining camps, 22 per cent said answered “yes” to the question “Do you have a hot bed i.e. does another shift use your bed?”

As mentioned above, this term can apply to either a bed shared between between shifts, or a bed (or room) that someone else uses in your week off. Either way, the practice is unpopular with miners who have little choice but to accept whatever conditions the companies provide them with in mining camps.

The ratio of people who hotbed is highest nationally in Queensland’s Bowen Basin, a coal mining area where in some cases mining companies shun locals and insist on a FIFO-only workforce.

News.com.au spoke this week to a miner in the Bowen basin region. Her name is Holly* and she drives massive trucks for a living. Let’s meet Holly and hear her story.

But first, let’s look at a super bloody big Bowen basin coalmine from the air.

MEET HOLLY. YOU MIGHT CALL HER A ‘WORKAHOLLYC’

Holly earns a six figure salary (just). But life is hard as a FIFO worker, or in Holly’s case, as a DIDO (Drive-in Drive-Out worker). For starters, there are the long hours.

“I’ve actually gotten used to 12-and-a-half hour shifts,” Holly says. “Though I think they’ve gotten harder as I’ve gotten older. I’m a real night owl but it’s monotonous sitting still, driving the same stretch of road. With the long hours that we do, I’m lucky if I sleep four or five hours a night”

This one is just a baby.

BUT HOLLY’S BIGGEST GRIPE BY FAR IS HER ACCOMMODATION

Holly works a week on, a week off. But as stated above, she never gets the same room. “I still can’t get accommodation that is permanent,” she laments.

“At a previous job when we used to do hotbeds (different rooms each week), you could at least try to choose or buddy up with someone on the crew that you knew so you could leave a bag in a corner with your belongings, sort of a trust system with the other person. But you can’t do that now.”

If you think about it, it’s not particularly great treatment of loyal employees. Imagine you work in an office and your work station had to be packed up after every shift. Then at the start of each working day, you had to take a new desk somewhere. All Holly wants is a room she can return to with a few personal effects. But that’s not allowed.

And by the way, the towels stink. “They’ve got quite a stale sort of smell about them,” Holly says. “I bring my own towels because the ones the company provides make me feel dirty.”

The beds aren’t terrific either. “Some mattresses are really springy and some are hard. And the bathroom is always black and mouldy. I bring my own bleach and I will clean my own shower and toilet.”

This isn’t Holly’s actual room. But maybe it will be next week. And that’s exactly what she’s so upset about.

HOLLY’S NOT THE ONLY UNHAPPY ONE

“From our perspective we don’t think it’s acceptable that people are hotbedding because of the fact that they should have their own room for their own privacy and get a little bit of home with them and after their long shifts and not be like a hotel.”

That’s Steve Smyth of the CFMEU talking. Steve says that 99.9 per cent of employees don’t like hotbedding and that one major coal company offered a percentage of money in their last agreement for employees to give up their permanent rooms. He says their tactics are not exactly subtle.

“You get what you’re given and if you don’t like it, there’s the highway.”

For Steve, as for Holly, it’s an issue about the dignity of workers and basic rights beyond a good wage. But he says the mining companies want one thing.

“The complete and utter power to control people.”

We contacted one of the major mining companies to ask why people couldn’t use the same room each swing (week-long stint), but they declined to comment.

AND BY THE WAY, THE MINING CAMP FOOD IS TERRIBLE

They call this “greens”.

“The food is sh*t, the vegetables are either raw, eggs are overcooked or rubbery, the bread can be mouldy and stale and the lettuce has no colour. Lunch is always the same food, just cold meats and salads with some plain cakes and crappy biscuits. Sometimes the fruit’s not even ripe.

That, in case you didn’t guess, was our girl Holly. We don’t think the mining camp caterers will be appearing on MasterChef any time soon. Unless they have like an inverse version of the show or something.

SO WHAT NEXT FOR OUR HOTBEDDING HEROINE?

For now, Holly remains a mining industry employee, like 300,000 or so Australians. The money’s just too good to refuse, even if the lifestyle quality that goes with it is being eroded by mining companies that don’t seem to understand that a happy workforce is a productive workforce.

*You guessed it, Holly’s name is not really Holly.

Originally published as Mining’s secret dirty laundry: almost one in four FIFO miners does hotbedding. And they hate it