Gina Rinehart Roy Hill Mine’s work deal gets axe

An enterprise deal covering train drivers delivering iron ore from Gina Rinehart’s Roy Hill Mine has been overturned.

Gina Rinehart at the Roy Hill Mine in the Pilbara in 2015.

An enterprise agreement covering train drivers delivering iron ore from Gina Rinehart’s Roy Hill Mine has been overturned by the Fair Work Commission, after the tribunal found it contained conditions that left workers worse off when compared with the award.

TRRC, a subsidiary of Railtrain Group, had a contract to supply about 50 train crew to Roy Hill to October 2018. The enterprise agreement covering the workers expired last year.

Roy Hill indicated it would offer Railtrain a new four-year contract provided an enterprise agreement was in place for the duration of the contract.

Railtrain set up a new subsidiary, Karijini Rail, in June 2018 and employed two train drivers three weeks later. The duo voted for the agreement, which was later approve­d by the commission.

In November 2018, 52 TRRC employees who had worked at Roy Hill were transferred to Karijini, where they were offered maximum-term contracts with the same flat rates as the two existing­ Karijini employees.

The Construction Forestry Maritime Mining and Energy Union objected to the approval of the agreement and on Tuesday a commission full bench upheld its appeal. The full bench said it did not accept Karijini’s claims that differences between the award and agreements were not detrimental to the drivers.

The award says an employee doing a 12-hour shift receives a 40-minute meal break. The employee is paid while not working and receives a break.

The agreement says that while employees receive a 40-minute paid meal break, “work continues” during the break. The full bench found that the company’s suggestion the agreement arrangement was “not detrimental compared to the award is frankly absurd”.

The full bench raised concerns about the agreement’s annual leave provisions and the absence of a provision for ongoing full-time or part-time employment when compared with the award.

“Although we accept that the steps taken by Karijini were reasonable steps to explain the terms of the agreement, they did little to explain the effect of terms of the agreement, which would alter in a detrimental fashion some of the terms of the award which then applied to the employees­,” it said.

The full bench said the company should have taken more steps to explain the changes to the award conditions and told them how to access a copy of the award.

“We therefore do not consider that Karijini took all reasonable steps to ensure that the effect of the terms of the agreement were explained to the two employees in the circumstances,” it said.

Tony Maher, national president of the CFMEU’s mining ­division, welcomed the decision, claiming the mining sector was “rife” with employers trying to apply “dodgy workplace agreements”. He said the union had succeeded in opposing about 50 agreements where companies got deals voted up by a small number of workers before seeking to apply them across larger groups of workers.

The full bench quashed approv­al of the agreement and resubmit­ted the company’s approva­l application to the commissi­on for redetermination.

The Australian sought comment­ from Roy Hill but the company was unable to provide a response before deadline.

Meanwhile, the CFMEU’s construction division will launch a constitutional challenge to the Coalition’s building code and ban on the Eureka flag being displayed on commonwealth projects.