Union Hopes Company Fair Dinkum

TODAY BHP Billiton met with the Union to further discuss the loss of 290 jobs at the Mt Arthur coal mine.

The entrance to BHP Billiton’s Mt Arthur mine

Peter Jordan, district president of the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union said the Company had advised them that they had received 260 expressions of interest for voluntary redundancies (VR).

“I’d be pretty disappointed and surprised if the Company can’t arrive at a resolution with us on this matter where no one loses their job forcibly,” said Mr Jordan.

“What they are going to do now is discuss with those individuals what their redundancy is worth then the individual has seven days after that to make a formal application for redundancy,” he said.

“Then what will happen is the Union will meet with the Company on the thirteenth of April to go through the outcome of the redundancies.

“Given the numbers of production workers who have applied for VR, assuming the Company doesn’t play games and accepts the people who have applied, or up to the number required, we would like to think that no one would be forcibly made redundant.

“In the previous rounds of redundancies with the tradesmen they actually refused to accept that (voluntary redundancies), they just punted the tradesmen and that’s why I say, provided they are not playing games with us, but at least on this occasion they’ve called for expressions and they’ve got plenty, which we thought they would.

“I would like to think if the Company is fair dinkum we won’t have anyone lose their job forcibly,” Peter Jordan said.

The Union acknowledged there would be many workers who would be using the process to find out what their payout would be worth, but the next round said they would not play a role in who was selected for the voluntary redundancies.

“Our approach would simply be that look there’s 75 production positions that you want to make redundant, if you’ve got 75 or more applications for people who genuinely want to take voluntary redundancy you sort that out with them and make sure that nobody is forcibly made redundant on the job,” he said.

“Of course if they don’t reassess them and they want to make people forcibly redundant then we’ll have to weigh up our options as a Union as to how we deal with that, whether we take that to the Fair Work Commission or not, but at the end of the day we will let the next three weeks play it out.

“The last time the engineers got punted it ended up in court for eight months and it is long and expensive, so if they can find volunteers to go then it seems the most sensible approach,” he said.

“I’d be pretty disappointed and surprised if the Company can’t arrive at a resolution with us on this matter where no one loses their job forcibly,” Peter Jordan said.