The workplace umpire has ordered two of the mining industry’s biggest labour hire firms to deliver pay rises of about $35,000 a year, even though they could make the contracts unviable and, ultimately, risk putting the workers out of a job.
The Fair Work Commission accepted Workpac’s claims that the same job, same pay orders, which deliver pay rises totalling about $5 million to 150 labour hire employees at Glencore’s Bulga coal mine in NSW, could render “wholly unviable” many of the firm’s commercial arrangements.
