Iron ore majors ramp up supply even as China faces challenges
Iron ore is one of the year’s worst performing major commodities, slumping by almost a quarter as China’s property crisis drags on.
Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting is pouring $26 million to local training in the face of an increasing opposition to the company’s plans to hire foreign workers.
The investment, reports Perth Now, is a contract condition for the company’s plan to use an enterprise migration agreement (EMA) granted by Australia’s government in May. The ruling allows Rinehart’s Roy Hill iron ore mining project to hire about 1,700 foreign workers to alleviate a labour shortage threatening the resources boom.
Roy Hill CEO Barry Fitzgerald told PerthNow that the company would train up to 2,000 Australian professionals, including 100 trainees, 100 apprentices and 100 Indigenous trainees. Two-thirds of the apprenticeships to be created will be offered to mature age applicants.
Instead of applying for an EMA, major miners have taken the bull by the horns and launched their own recruitment initiatives earlier this year. In April, for instance, Rio started an aggressive recruitment campaign to fill 6,000 vacancies across its 30 operations in Australia, the largest campaign of its kind in the country’s history.
MINING.com published an article in January about the reasons why mining professionals should take the mining jobs boom in Down Under with a pinch of salt.
Click here before you jump on the next plane headed for the Antipodes.
Image from YouTube.
4 Comments
kenny
digging throuth the whole world is a better idiea to be concidered as your may find hard working people as for south africa, it has most hard working cititizens i think you shoulld put that in mind and concider it.
Jazmin1363
GIna please give opportunity to some mexicans, we are hard workers and wont dissapoint you. With the new incompetent president for the next six years we need opportunities in other countries.
FIFO 1
$26 million to spread over 2000 supposed new jobs, and that is for the LIFETIME of the project. Do the math, people… The best we will see will be the 300 jobs that they have specified, and there is no time frame for them to complete the training so it can be delayed until WELL after the completion of the project.
This is not an act of generosity, or of any real intention to follow through. It is simply the bare minimum stipulated by the Government here to ensure she can import cheap labour. She has applied to import 1700 ordinary overseas workers, ie truck drivers etc, (not even “highly skilled workers”) which could and should be sourced from the local population.
The more imports she uses the more likely she is to have trouble with any Australian players (companies and individuals), and it would be sufficient to enable the whole project to become strangled by “the weakest link” objecting to her practices. She has already put more local people than enough’s noses out of joint.
I am not pro-unionism, but the modus operandi of this woman has got to be seen to be believed. (search “Fairfax Media Gina” in Google). “On the nose” does not even come close.
The distinction in all this discussion is that both sides of politics here cannot let this happen or it will be electoral suicide. Gina is trying to use a type of immigration/work visa allocation system in a way it was never meant to be used. (meant to be used for “highly skilled workers”, in other words mining engineers, geologists etc).
As an example, do we really want to import some foreign safety staff with their record? I’m sure there may be some good ones, but I doubt they could match the safety standards we need here. You would end up “re-training” them for the first couple of years anyway, so why not start local staff and keep the jobs here?
My prediction: The Roy Hill project will not proceed to completion.
2ndOrion
Good Plan, Gina.