Australian tension after retrenchment

Finance

Ethnic tensions rose in Australia this week after an engineering contractor retrenched 54 local workers while retaining up to 70 similarly-skilled Filipinos at a Chinese-owned iron-ore project in the Pilbara region of Western Australia.

The Adelaide-based contractor Ottoway Engineering denied there was any preference against the Australian workers, saying their role at the project had been completed.

However, the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU) told The Australian newspaper that the workers were “irate” after being removed from Citic Pacific’s Sino Iron project.

The Filipinos are said to be temporary overseas workers on '457' visas, and so can only be legally employed if skilled labour cannot be sourced locally.

Representatives from AMWU’s Western Australian office met with Ottoway, and tensions were said to have eased somewhat. However, the union said that it will carry out further investigations into the matter.

Ottoway chief executive officer Bryan Tidswell rejected claims the company had retained the Filipinos in preference to local workers. He said the majority of the 54 workers were laid off “as their roles and expertise were no longer required”. He noted that the construction phase of the 450MW power plant was nearly complete.

“The redundancies were made on the basis of the operational requirements of the business, and employees were appropriately selected for redundancy based on operational requirements, not on a discriminatory basis,” he said.

Mr Tidswell added: “All of the redundancies were managed in a manner that is compliant with the terms of Ottoway’s collective agreement and, more broadly, in compliance with Australia’s industrial relations legislation as it applies projects of this nature.”

Talks between the AMWU and Ottoway are continuing.