Gold Fields Australia has had to reissue its four-year agreement to a second vote by its workforce due to an embarrassing ‘copy & paste’ fail, vindicating the AWU’s position the negotiations were rushed.
In March the AWU complained to the Fair Work Commission the company was not bargaining in good faith after it only allocated four days for negotiations with workers.
Now in an embarrassing backdown Gold Fields Australia (GFA) has been forced to write to its workforce asking them to vote on the agreement again.
GFA have admitted they simply hit ‘cut & paste’ on the previous agreement so instead of running to 2026 the agreement will expire on 30 April this year, in 2 days, in effect a one-month agreement.
GFA run the St Ives, Agnew, Granny Smith and Gruyere gold mines around Kalgoorlie in the WA Goldfields and have roughly 1800, mostly FIFO, employees. The average worker earns less than $80,000 a year, a far cry from the large pay packets of FIFO iron ore workers in the Pilbara.
“We told Gold Fields Australia four days wasn’t enough to get over the details of long legal document which covers every term and condition of a worker’s employment, and guess what, it wasn’t,” says AWU WA Secretary Brad Gandy.
“They didn’t listen to us in their haste to ram through this dodgy document and now they have wasted everyone’s time and money.
“After refusing to listen to our members concerns regarding the negotiation process Gold Fields Australia has failed to update their copy and paste agreement’s end date.
“Members are saying to us ‘If Gold Fields Australia is this sloppy with basic word processing what about our safety on the job?’ and it’s hard not to agree, if it wasn’t so serious, it would be laughable.
“If Gold Fields Australia can’t be trusted with something as basic as the dates in a document, how can our members trust they will receive the pay and conditions they’ve signed up for?
“We still have huge concerns with this agreement as it has no yearly pay increases, which is highly unusual in Australia, almost all workers have a modest annual pay rise written into their agreement to ensure they don’t fall behind inflation.
“Most industrial agreements in this country at least guarantee an annual cost of living/CPI rise.
“On Wednesday we saw Australia’s inflation rate go up by 5.1%, the biggest jump in 20 years, so that means with no annual increase in an agreement a GFA worker will potentially see their wage go backwards by 5% this year.
“Workers have driven significant productivity growth at GFA in the last few financial years, and yet still they get treated with contempt.
“What members are saying is that GFA, which announced a $621 million net profit earlier this year, just isn’t listening to them.
“Gold is at all-time highs and yet still this outfit doesn’t care enough to even make sure the document which covers their employees is watertight, it’s disgraceful,” says AWU WA Secretary Brad Gandy.
