Despite the onset of massive projects, Western Australia has not been handed the carte blanche to employ foreign workers given to the Snowy Mountains Scheme 60 years ago.
MORE than 100,000 people worked on the Snowy Mountains Scheme over the 25-year period the engineering feat took to be completed, before deadline and under budget.
Claimed to be the birthplace of multiculturalism in Australia, the post World War II project started when there was a serious shortage of skilled personnel in the country.
Two-thirds of those who worked on the scheme were born offshore. Some were contracted overseas on the basis of their skills, others were assisted migrants bound to work at the direction of the Commonwealth for two years, while the remaining migrants freely chose to work on the scheme to access the comparatively high wages on offer.
Fast-forward 35 years and another project of national significance is under way – the $40 billion-plus Gorgon natural gas project on Barrow Island, off the Pilbara coast of Western Australia.
“A project like Gorgon in its own way can be seen as being as significant as the Snowy Mountain Scheme in its day,” says James Pearson, chief executive of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry WA.
“How did Australia build the Snowy? It brought in a workforce from overseas. That was seen rightfully as a nation-building project. What is about to happen in this state is just as significant in terms of building the Australian nation as what happened after the Second World War. But do we see the federal or state government approaching the task as a task of nation building? No.”
When New Zealand-born engineer William Hudson was chosen to head the Snowy Mountains Scheme, he was instructed by the federal government to seek workers from overseas.
In 2009, the most positive piece of news regarding workforce preparation for the Gorgon project has been the federal government announcement that an employment coordinator would be appointed to work with the joint venture partners.
Attendees at a recent WA Business News migration roundtable commended the announcement – but it’s hardly the carte blanche handed to Mr Hudson 60 years ago.
Bigger than Gorgon
CCIWA research undertaken last year shows the state will be about 140,000 workers short by 2017 of what is needed.
“It’s not just about Gorgon, there’s a whole number of other projects stacked up behind it,” Mr Pearson says.
The extent of the skills shortage problem, which momentarily subsided during the financial crisis, is not lost on the state’s employers; especially those operating businesses in sectors that are the most reliant on overseas workers.
Seashells Hospitality Group managing director Paul King says governments at all levels don’t understand the level of need employers have for workers.
“Gorgon is just one project and that’s going to take a lot of people out of the workforce and then there are others following behind it,” says Mr King, who was recently re-elected to head the Board of Tourism Council WA for the next two years.
“All these people are going to be earning good money. They are going to come down here and want to spend it in Perth and expect to sit in a restaurant and have someone serve them with a smile and not spill red wine all over their lap, and it’s not going to happen unless we have people well trained.”
While industries such as hospitality and healthcare are known for relying on overseas-born workers, the skills shortage affects a diverse set of employers.
Henderson-based ship builder Austal employs up to 340 largely Filipino workers on 457 visas – the common program for local employers to sponsor skilled overseas workers – at any one time to plug a skills gap.
Austal founding director John Rothwell says his workforce is often poached by the resources sector, which includes all manner of companies, such as miners and constructors.
“We can’t compete with the sort of salaries being offered for short-term contracts,” Mr Rothwell says. “We don’t blame the workers for it, of course, because they’ve got a house or a car to buy or something or other.”
As the long line-up of resources projects prepare their workforces, buoyed by the fading memory of a financial crisis, employers outside of the resources sector understand their workers are prime targets.
“What’s ahead? This will happen all over again. Six or seven or eight months ago some of the workers that we lost started to come back to us, but that won’t be for long. I think we’ll start to lose them all again shortly,” Mr Rothwell says.
“Industry, particularly the mining sector, is very good at blaming everyone bar themselves for the shortage of skilled workers.
“They complain to governments [but] governments don’t train people, or not very many of them. It’s industry that trains people and industry can only look at itself when there’s a shortage.”
More than migration
Austal was at the centre of the migration debate in 2009 following an ultimately successful fight with the Department of Immigration and Citizenship after the ship builder was accused of breaching wage laws.
The argument – over how the workers were paid, not how much – has also angered unions by refusing to dismiss migrant workers before local staff during the crisis.
Some, if not all unions are very cautious about the prospect of any increase in overseas labour and companies hiring 457 visa workers.
“There is also a belief that some employers say they can’t get local labour and use that as an invalid excuse to import cheap labour,” the Construction, Forestry, Mining, and Energy Union says on its website.
Mr Rothwell says short-term visa workers aren’t the solution for employers.
“457 must only ever be seen as a temporary solution to pick up the fluctuations in the demand for workers. We need permanent workers one way or the other,” he says.
Diversified food and agribusiness company Craig Mostyn has reported high success rates in helping migrant workers become permanent residents. It provides various services to its foreign workforce, such as English lessons, to help them on that transition.
For executive director Andrew Mostyn, solely hiring abattoir workers from the local Shire of Northam is simply not feasible.
“About 70 per cent of our abattoir workers come from the local shire and there’s just no more local shire people to work, so we are always going to be struggling to build the number of workers,” Mr Mostyn says.
“We’ve gone everywhere, from backpackers to the prison to look for labour.”
