Mining giant offers FIFO workers up to $30K to relocate

A multinational resources company is offering huge incentives to attract enthusiastic employees to its operations.

Rio Tinto hopes to avoid another drop in production due to a lack of enthusiastic employees by offering fly-in fly-out (FIFO) workers up to $30,000 to move to Western Australia.

QMEB understands the money can be used to cover the cost of relocating, living, flights, renting and repaying the mortgage. The latest amount eclipses the State Government’s previous $20,000 Building Bonus Grant to help cover the cost of building a new home in Perth or regional WA. Applications for that grant closed at the end of 2020.

Hiring now

Some of the many advertised positions include:

• supervisor opportunities – mobile equipment maintenance (multiple)
• specialist mine planning engineers (multiple)
• reliability engineer – signal and systems
• mechanical maintainers (multiple)
• electrical maintainers (multiple)
• fixed plant operators (multiple)
• condition monitoring technician
• secretary department (multiple)
• senior engineer maintenance
• engineer mine production
• senior project engineer
• geotechnical engineer.

Click here to apply.

Successful applicants will be offered permanent positions, a variety of day or day and night rotating rosters, full domestic relocation assistance, company housing in all residential towns, subsidised rent and utilities, two flights to Perth each year for employees and family members, student boarding assistance, staff discounts and comprehensive medical benefits for employees and their families.

Availability woes

Since the beginning of the year Rio has struggled to find mobile and available staff due to state border restrictions that helped contain the pandemic.

It also blamed “fixed plant reliability and above-average wet weather in the mines” for causing nearly all mineral production activity to decline in the first quarter of 2021. This included copper (-9 per cent), iron ore pellets and concentrate (-8 per cent), titanium dioxide (-5 per cent) and bauxite (-2 per cent). The only exception was aluminium, which produced 803 kilo tonnes and jumped 3 per cent.

“In the first quarter, labour resource availability and weather challenges disrupted maintenance in the [Pilbara] mine processing facilities, which will be prioritised for the rest of the year,” the company said in its latest quarterly report.

“We have proactively managed COVID-19 challenges as well as some wet weather impacts in Australia, and overall project delivery is satisfactory. Uncertainty continues to exist around local situations, border access, availability and movement of people and goods.”

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