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20 April, 2009
As labour in Australia approaches 28 April next week, the International Commemoration Day for Dead and Injured Workers, one mining company stands beneath the rest with a dismal safety record: BHP Billiton.
In Western Australia’s rich Pilbara mining section in the country’s northwest, BHP has had five workers die over the past nine months, four less than have died in BHP employ in the region in the last nine years. Three of those deaths in recent months have been contract workers – employed by subsidiaries of BHP’s primary contractor in the region, Leighton Holdings – while two were direct BHP workers.
It is estimated that 75% of BHP’s total workforce of 10,000 workers in the Pilbara are employed by contractors. On safety, one union official claimed BHP Billiton is less disciplined toward its contract employers than to its own workers.
Whether or not that changes might depend on an external safety audit being conducted after the most recent workplace tragedy, the 19 March death of a contract worker employed by Leighton’s John Holland subsidiary. He was killed after falling off a piece of machinery at BHP’s Mount Whaleback iron ore mine in Newman.
But since that death, there have two near tragedies, the latest on 8 April when an iron ore truck struck a worker at BHP’s Nelson Point operations in Port Hedland. The safety audit, mandated by Australia’s Mines Safety and Inspection Act of 1994, means that stop-work orders were placed on 12 company operations late in March, interrupting production.
BHP’s recent industrial safety record has brought condemnation from the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) and the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union (AMWU).
“It’s fine to put stop work notices on,” stated CFMEU’s Joe McDonald, quoted in the Kalgoorlie Miner, a regional newspaper. “But they need to be extremely well enforced because BHP will still find ways around these notices.” McDonald said he favours company prosecution when industrial deaths happen.
The AMWU has discounted BHP’s “safety is a priority” rhetoric, and has pushed hard for state regulators to conduct full and independent investigations.
The AMWU publicly stated that such an inquiry is absolutely necessary following the second death in a matter of two weeks. On 24 February, a railroad track maintenance worker was killed on the job. The 56-year-old machine worker was killed when he was hit by a BHP train on the company’s Tabba rail line near Port Hedland.
Last year, two deaths occurred within nine days of one another at BHP Billiton’s 85%-owned Yandi iron ore mine in the Pilbara. Both workers were employed by HWE Mining, another subsidiary of Leighton Holdings and a company that is BHP’s exclusive mining contractor at Yandi.
One of the workers, a 19-year-old, was crushed to death on 4 September 2008 when the small truck he was driving was crushed by a large haul vehicle. The other HWE employee died on 26 August in an industrial accident while he was changing a tyre.
And less than a month earlier, on 29 July, a 52-year-old BHP worker was killed when a scissor lift toppled onto him while he was working in a locomotive repair shop at BHP’s Port Hedland ore crushing and shipping facility. (That same day, at BHP Billiton’s Klipspruit coal mine in Northern Province, South Africa, a miner was killed when a drill rig fell on him.)
Less than a month before Workers’ Memorial Day, Australian trade union activists were not silent on BHP Billiton and its contractors’ death toll. At the Safety Institute of Australia’s “Safety in Action” Conference in Melbourne on 31 March, CFMEU and AMWU members gathered in loud protest on safety issues. The reason: John Holland Chairman Janet Holmes was delivering the keynote address.