7 September, 2009
The Construction, Forestry, Mining, and Energy Union (CFMEU) of Australia has launched a campaign against global mining giant Xstrata to preserve coal mining jobs in New South Wales (NSW). The Swiss-based company, on 31 July, announced it was cutting 122 of 550 jobs at its Ulan Mine in western NSW, and 158 more jobs at its Tahmoor colliery in southern NSW.
The CFMEU disputes Xstrata’s claim that the scheduled redundancies are intended to improve efficiencies by “realigning employee numbers with the current operating environment.” To Xstrata, that means reduced pricing on thermal coal brought by the global financial crisis.
The union claims Xstrata’s real intent is to hire more contractors at Ulan, specifically as the company prepares development of major new coal deposits at Ulan West.
CFMEU National President Tony Maher called the cuts callous and offensive. “We highlight this as corporate greed, as this is a very profitable mine,” he said. “There are times when retrenchments are unavoidable. This is not one of those times.”
CFMEU’s Tony Maher
The Ulan mine is forecast to post an A$140 million profit this year, down from A$330 million in 2008, but still extremely healthy profits considering the global recession. The CFMEU has brought forced dismissal cases before the Australian Industrial Relations Commissions, but a 24 August hearing to block the Ulan redundancies failed.
Some 500 people marched last week in Mudgee, NSW, near Ulan as the first wave of layoffs was to begin. The mayor of Mudgee, a community of 7,000 some 260 kilometres west of Sydney, said the cuts will have a serious knock-on effect to other jobs in the town. The CFMEU says for every high-paid mining job that is lost, another four service or retail jobs will be affected.
The union has started a website on Xstrata’s job cuts at Ulan. It can be found here.
Xstrata bought majority control of Ulan in 2001 and controls a 90% stake in the mine. Mitsubishi Development owns the other 10%. At Tahmoor, a mine producing coking coal that Xstrata bought from Centennial Coal in 2007, the company used the same excuse for issuing redundancy notices: market prices are not strong enough to support the current level of 493 jobs.
Xstrata’s job curtailments at the two collieries are not the only sites in Australia where the company is forcing redundancies. In June, the tightly held mining concern said it was terminating thermal coal mining at its United Colliery in the Hunter Valley region of NSW. That colliery is to cease operating by March 2010. And in January 2009, Xstrata announced job cutbacks at the Oaky Creek No. 1 mine in central Queensland.