Blair Athol, Bougainville and Boron seemingly have nothing in common apart from beginning with the same letter of the alphabet.
One is the coal mine in central Queensland; another is an island to the east of Papua New Guinea in the Pacific Ocean; and the third is a small town in the Mojave Desert almost halfway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
But there is one unifying thread between these three places thousands of kilometres apart: the Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto.
Workers at Blair Athol were at the cutting edge of Rio Tinto’s tactics in the 1990s to deny workers of their rights to bargain collectively or being represented by a union. Workers there and in the Hunter Valley eventually won court-ordered pay-outs totaling tens of millions of dollars after it was proved they had been victimised and unfairly dismissed simply for being union members.
The people of Bougainville campaigned for a decade to close the massive open cut Panguna copper and gold mine – an environmental and social disaster that is still working its way through the US court system.
Meanwhile, a new battlefront has emerged at Boron, the site of the largest open cut mine in California and source of half of the world’s supply of the mineral borax which goes into products as diverse as fertilisers, pesticides, detergents and plasma TV screens.
In Boron, Rio Tinto is trying to introduce the same kind of anti-worker, union-busting strategy that it rolled out in Australia more than a decade ago – and against which, ironically, Australian workers are fighting back under the Fair Work laws.
The three places converged in Melbourne this month in a protest against Rio Tinto’s “corporate malfeasance” at the company’s Australian head office on 22 April.
Representatives of the workers and communities from each of the three locations had originally planned to attend the annual general meeting to tell shareholders about Rio Tinto’s shameful record over industrial relations, human rights and the environment.
When the AGM was postponed because of the grounding of the world’s airlines due to the Icelandic volcano, they went ahead with the protest with the message that Rio Tinto – the third largest mining company in the world which operates in 50 countries and earnt $US5 billion in 2009 - needs to begin acting like a responsible corporate citizen.
“We were pretty much aware of it [Rio’s record] before because with the internet, people were always popping stuff up, but you didn’t want to believe that they would do it to you,” says Terri Judd, one of the workers at Boron.
At Boron, Rio Tinto locked out its 570 hourly workers on 31 January as it sought to enforce a new workplace agreement that would take away job security by converting permanent jobs into temporary, part-time or outsourced positions, give the company the unilateral right to cut pay and make changes to shifts and hours without consultation, and to declare sections of the mine “non-union”.
Boron is the world’s biggest borax mine, its 230 metre deep mine supplying nearly half the world’s supply of refined borates. The mine has been operating since 1925, and was bought by Rio Tinto in 1967. Work at the mine is dangerous: 207 workers have been injured since 2000 and five have been killed since 1991.
The 11-week dispute has at times been ugly, with Rio Tinto hiring armed, uniformed guards and using helicopters flying overhead to threaten employees, while attempting to starve the employees into submission.
But Rio Tinto has underestimated the solidarity of the workers, who are members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.
If the company thought the lock-out would break their resolve, it was badly mistaken. It has picked a fight with people like Terri Judd, a Gulf War veteran, mother, and third-generation employee of the mine.
The small town of Boron is also backing the workers against the company.
“Probably over the past 10 years, there’s been issues and this has finally just come to the point where we had to stand up and say enough is enough,” Judd says.
“Our solidarity is standing strong. We’re very determined.
“When the company came on January 28 and they threw this proposal of theirs at us and pretty much told us you either accept this or we’re going to lock you out, we called an emergency union meeting and when we pretty much took a vote it was like 98% of the union body said they would rather be locked out than take that proposal.
“And that feeling is still pretty strong after 10 weeks.
“We’re getting major support from the town because they know if we lose the union, we pretty much lose the town. You’re not going to be able to afford to live there any more.
“It [the mine] is its lifeblood. Out of a town of about 2500, you figure at least a third of that town is connected to that company in one way or another. It used to be if you worked at that mine, you lived in Boron – that was union and management.”
Although Rio Tinto claims the lock-out has not had a significant impact on operations at the mine, there is strong evidence that production has halved and injuries are rising because the company has been unable to hire properly-trained and skilled strike-breakers to do the work.
The workers’ determination is finally beginning to get a result. The company and the union sat down for the first time in many weeks on 14 and 15 April to restart negotiations for a union collective agreement, although there is a long road ahead.
But the lockout has taken its toll. While the workers are eligible to claim unemployment benefits, many are struggling.
“We’ve got people that are losing their homes, you know, that are having to go into bankruptcy,” Judd says.
“We’ve got people that are leaving, that are having to find jobs elsewhere and a lot of them are not going to come back.”
Judd conveyed a powerful message to Rio Tinto’s management and to other workers that in the modern globalised economy, the concept of “an injury to one is an injury to all” has a deeper meaning.
“It’s been great to see people standing up to support us. It gets you right in the heart,” she says.
“What happens in one part of this world, you know, affects us all, all around the world, whether you’re a union in Canada, America, or Australia.
“We’re all linked together and if we have to draw the line in the sand up here [in California] to help protect the jobs in Australia, that’s what we’re going to do.”
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