Unions launch push for rare deal with Pilbara iron ore giant

Unions and BHP will soon start negotiating their first agreement in more than a decade in Western Australia’s Pilbara iron ore mines, using a window opened by changes to industrial laws by the Albanese Labor government.

A BHP spokesman said the Australian Workers’ Union, along with the Electrical Trades Union and the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union initiated the bargaining under new legislation that does not require them to show evidence of workers’ support.

“BHP will comply with our obligations under the new section of the Fair Work Act and bargain with the AWU, ETU and AMWU,” he said.

BHP’s WA iron ore business has about 14,000 employees and contractors.

The negotiation will cover BHP’s South Flank and Area C mines. Area C is covered by an enterprise bargaining agreement that expired almost five years ago.

The new legislation allows unions to lodge a request to bargain with an employer when an EBA has expired, but for less than five years, and the new agreement will cover substantially the same group of workers.

AWU WA secretary Brad Gandy said workers covered by the negotiation included truck drivers, operators of heavy equipment such as diggers and drilling rigs, fixed plant operators and maintenance trades such as mechanics and electricians.

BHP’s iron ore division is the bedrock of the company. The Melbourne-based company shipped a record 287 million tonnes of iron from the Pilbara last financial year.

Iron ore earnings before interest, taxation and depreciation of $US16.7 billion in the 12 months to June 2023 were almost two-thirds of the miner’s total earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation.

Minerals Council of Australia chief executive Tania Constable criticised the step towards greater unionisation in Australia’s most prosperous mining area.

“It is the first step in a union power grab by unions who have boasted for years about ‘re-unionising the Pilbara’,” she said.

Constable said the “deliberate loophole” in the new industrial laws allowed unions to impose bargaining on employers without the support of workers, even when those workers were in well-paid, secure jobs.

“The mining sector has repeatedly warned the Albanese government of the economic dangers posed by its reckless overhaul of industrial relations laws,” she said.

Constable said the move came as WA’s mining sector was already feeling the headwinds of falling commodity prices and increasing competition in critical minerals, which had forced multiple shutdowns and job losses across the state.

The AWU operates in the Pilbara with the Mining and Energy Union under the banner of the Western Mine Workers Alliance.

Constable and her iron ore mining members may fear the group repeats the success of another WA union joint venture.

The Offshore Alliance with the Maritime Union, formed six years ago, initially covered offshore workers but it has since expanded to offshore gas plants.

It had more than 3000 members at the end of last year, covered by 53 different enterprise agreements, according to its website.

Some of the agreements were preceded by high-profile industrial action. In 2022, Shell lost an estimated $1 billion of production during 76 days of industrial action on its Prelude floating LNG vessel off the Kimberley coast.

In 2023, just the prospect of industrial action by the Offshore Alliance at Woodside and Chevron gas export plants in WA sent European gas prices up almost 40 per cent.