Union battlegrounds back in the Pilbara
The Pilbara may see its first worker strike in decades as part of a major push from unions to re-enter the region. This week, the Electrical Trades Union (ETU) said it had applied for a protected action ballot covering 60 BHP (ASX: BHP) high-voltage workers — which the union says would mark the first industrial action at a major mining company in the Pilbara since the Fair Work Act took effect in 2009.The ballot follows a year of protracted negotiations between the employees and the company. The ETU says BHP workers are seeking their first workplace agreement, having been employed on disparate common-law contracts over the past two decades, with variance of more than 30% between people doing the same work. ETU WA secretary Adam Woodage says the workers do an extraordinary job in tough conditions and remote locations. “For decades their employer has maintained a system of playing them off against one another with unequal individual contracts that provide no certainty or transparency, and place enormous power in the hands of individual managers to build empires through favouritism,” he said. “ thought that the days of their employees taking industrial action in the Pilbara were history. They were wrong.” These BHP workers are not the only ones pushing for change in the Pilbara. In February 2025, Rio Tinto (ASX: RIO) workers launched a majority support petition to initiate bargaining at the company’s Paraburdoo iron ore operations. The Mining and Energy Union (MEU) says the petition was an initiative of the Western Mine Workers Alliance (WMWA), a joint venture of the MEU and the Australian Workers Union. MEU iron ore train drivers have also been part of the broader reunionisation push throughout the Pilbara, securing improved agreements with both Rio Tinto and BHP. The BHP ballot marks a new phase in the push to rebuild union presence in the Pilbara — a region historically associated with militant unionism. During the 1970s, workers spent an average of more than 10 days a year on strike, according to the Minerals Council of Australia (MCA). The decline of union power throughout the Pilbara began in the 1980s when mining company Peko-Wallsend moved against entrenched union work practises and agreements at the Robe River mine. By the 1990s and through the mining boom of the 2000s, the region was a union wasteland. The introduction of the Federal Government's Closing Loopholes reforms, enacted through the 2023 and 2024 Acts, represented a significant re-orientation of Australia’s workplace relations system and a major opportunity for unions across the country. According to the Australian Resources and Energy Employer Association (AREEA) the reforms shifted the balance away from enterprise-based negotiation, commercial certainty and clear workforce boundaries, and toward expanded arbitration, increased union leverage and greater regulatory discretion. As part of the reforms, new Same Job, Same Pay provisions were introduced into the Fair Work Act to ensure labour hire employees were paid at least the same as employees who are directly hired and are doing the same job. The ruling meant that more than 2000 labour hire workers at BHP Mitsubishi Alliance (BMA) coal mines in Queensland were set to receive significant pay rises. BHP challenged the ruling in the Federal Court, as it would affect workers at its Goonyella Riverside, Peak Downs and Saraji coal operations in Queensland, but the Full Federal Court upheld the FWC’s decision in December 2025. BHP has since sought special leave to escalate its challenge to the High Court. The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) is now advocating for the Same Job, Same Pay policy to cover additional employment conditions and to narrow the service contractor exemption — changes AREEA says would dramatically?expand the regime beyond what Australians were originally told it would do. AREEA chief executive Steve Knott AM says the Federal Government repeatedly assured the community that its policy would be limited to arrangements where labour hire was purportedly being used to undermine wage rates in certain workplaces. “This is no longer about ‘same job same pay’ for labour hire workers — it’s about the ACTU’s fantasy of creating ‘same employment package for everyone’, with no regard for how major projects and complex multi-employer workplaces actually operate,” he said. AREEA is concerned the push to broaden the regime ignored the well-established role of specialist contractors across Australia’s resources and energy sector.“Major LNG, mining and energy projects rely on specialist contractors delivering defined scopes of work such as maintenance, engineering and shutdown services,” Mr Knott said. “These are specialist service businesses performing defined work — they are not labour hire providers. “If unions succeed in collapsing that distinction, the FWC will effectively be asked to reshape how entire industries organise and contract work.“If Australia becomes a more expensive and inflexible place to deliver major projects, investment will simply flow to other jurisdictions — and the jobs will go with it.”
