ICEM Maintains Help Offer - Despite Mixed Signals From Company

The 20-million-strong International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers' Unions (ICEM) is maintaining its offer to facilitate an attempt to resolve ongoing disputes between Rio Tinto, the world's biggest mining corporation, and the ICEM-affiliated Australian miners' union CFMEU.

The company is embroiled in a series of long-running industrial disputes in Australia, essentially over its attempts to deunionise mines and to move workers away from collective agreements onto individual employment contracts.

ICEM British Vice-President Fred Higgs (left) and Australian Vice-President John Maitland in discussion just before Rio Tinto's London AGM.

But the ICEM offer drew a very cool response from Rio Tinto at its Annual General Meeting in London today.

A number of Australian and British trade unionists had bought shares, so that they could raise questions during the AGM about the company's attitude to unions in Australia and elsewhere.

Asked if Rio Tinto would accept the ICEM offer, the company's Chief Executive Leon Davis replied: "We have had meetings with ICEM officials. From my point of view, I said that it was a dispute that could best be solved in Australia."

However, Davis went on to tell the shareholders that he would have "no problem" with a meeting between Leigh Clifford, Chief Executive of the company's energy group, and John Maitland, who is both ICEM Vice-President and National Secretary of the CFMEU.

Maitland was one of the Australian trade unionists attending the AGM in London today. Also lobbying there were Reg Coates, National Vice-President of the CFMEU's mining and energy division, Stuart Vaccanio, President of the CFMEU lodge at Rio Tinto's Gordonstone mine and Carole Maitland, who is patron of the Miners' Support Group.

Maitland, Higgs and Gordonstone miners' leader Stuart Vaccanio demonstrate outside the AGM.

ICEM Vice-President Fred Higgs was among British trade unionists taking part in the AGM and in protests outside the venue before the meeting.

"We are disappointed and very concerned that Rio Tinto did not clearly take up the ICEM offer," John Maitland commented afterwards. "The tone of the AGM was certainly more courteous than last year, but nothing in what was said by Chairman Robert Wilson and Chief Executive Leon Davis suggested that Rio Tinto is seriously interested in resolving the Australian issues with us.

"That is highly regrettable," Maitland said, "because Rio Tinto should now really be turning over a new leaf in its Australian industrial relations - and then going on to conclude a global-level agreement with the ICEM. Such a global agreement could be of great benefit to the company. One issue that it could cover would be the means of improving the company's health and safety performance, about which both Robert Wilson and Leon Davis very frankly expressed their concern during today's AGM."

But, Maitland concluded, "in the present circumstances, we have no choice but to continue and intensify the ICEM campaign on Rio Tinto. This will include action at the company's Australian AGM in Perth on 27 May."

In Perth as today in London, shareholders will be handed an extra document as they enter the meeting. Rio Tinto - Behind The Facade is this year's edition of the stakeholders' report published by the ICEM in cooperation with a wide range of groups campaigning to improve Rio Tinto's respect for human rights - notably workers' and indigenous peoples' rights - and for health, safety and the environment.

Carole Maitland makes sure the arriving shareholders get the full picture.

Out today, the new report assesses Rio Tinto's performance in these fields against the yardstick of the company's own in-house business principles. Detailed examples from around the world show how the company is failing to live up to those principles.

"Rio Tinto must fulfil not only its fiduciary duty," the report insists, "but also its wider social duty to all those stakeholders who have contributed, and continue to contribute, to the survival and success of the company."
Many a shareholder was seen studying the report after - and during - the AGM.