The Sydney Morning Herald January 11, 2015 Saskia Pickles
After two decades as a fly-in fly-out (FIFO) worker, Peter Miller had a good handle on the lifestyle. He knew the long hours, the blokey environment, the hot, hard work and the large pay cheques.
When his then 23-year-old stepson Rhys Connor started FIFO work, he wasn't worried at first. But in July 2013, at the age of 25 and after only a brief period of depression, Rhys committed suicide at a Pilbara mine site in Western Australia.
Rhys is one of several FIFO workers in WA who committed suicide in the past 18 months, prompting a Western Australian parliamentary inquiry into the mental health impacts of FIFO work arrangements. The inquiry began in August and is still going.
A WA coroner's report presented to the inquiry in September found that from 2008 to 2013, 24 WA workers committed suicide, seven of whom were explicitly named as FIFO workers, while the others were in occupations suggestive of FIFO work such as miners and drillers.
The evidence that Rhys's parents Peter and Anita Miller gave to the parliamentary inquiry was described as "telling and emotional" by the chairman of a discussion paper. They spoke about begging him to report his depression to management, or allowing them to, but their son refusing to because he feared losing his job.
"All I can say to anybody that wants to do FIFO is never put the money first. If you feel that you're having trouble doing it, it's not worth the money," Peter Miller told Fairfax Media.
The Millers believe WA's estimated 67,000 FIFO workers should be able to choose more family-friendly rosters if they want to and that companies should have to record and be accountable for mental health incidences.
"We just want people to understand that depression and suicide can happen in any family and there are ways to improve life on isolated camps to help these men step forward without fear of job loss and stigma," Anita Miller said.
FIFO rosters vary based on roles, companies and projects, with shorter rosters such as eight days on, six days off or two weeks on, one week off keenly sought after.
Many, particularly those in the construction stage of projects, often working for contractors, are offered only one roster: four weeks on, one week off.
As part of a growing push for more family-friendly rosters, many FIFO workers on longer rosters around WA have asked to take a pay cut in exchange for fewer weeks away.
Australian Manufacturing Workers Union WA secretary Steve McCartney has been lobbying for workers on sites such as Chevron's $US54 billion Gorgon liquefied natural gas plant on Barrow Island, 50 kilometres west of Karratha, in the Pilbara.
Workers building the LNG project want to move from 26 days on and nine days off to 20 days on, 10 days off. For those workers, who take home on average $150,000-$180,000 a year working 12-hour days, the change would amount to about an $8000 a year pay cut.
"They go backwards in money, but they end up spending more time with their family and they're prepared to sacrifice that cash," McCartney said.
Miller said his son was "the happiest, luckiest young fellow", whose sudden onset of depression became overwhelming because of his FIFO work environment.
Rhys had been going through a relationship break-up with his fiancee and found it increasingly difficult to leave his family and young son from a previous relationship, his father said. While he had reached out for help, he was concerned about losing his job.
"He had debt. He was obligated to try to keep working in that industry to try to get himself out of debt - that's how he felt. In the weeks before he died, Rhys was in tears having to leave home, to leave his child, Miller said. "The isolation and where he was contributed to his demise.
"In these situations when they've got too much time to think about things, or they've got nobody to talk to, the problems just manifest."
Through his own experiences as a FIFO worker and seeing changes after his son's death, Miller believes companies are beginning to do more to make workers feel valued instead of "like a number", but turning around the culture will require serious, not token investment.
"The culture is who cares - nobody cares," Miller said. "At the moment it's all about get the job done and don't worry about people's welfare."
He said companies such as Rio Tinto, whose mine site Rhys was working on as a contractor with OTOC, needed to overhaul procedures following a death on site, improve communication and carry out thorough investigations. "It shouldn't be written off. Nobody should be treated how we were treated," he said.
Rio Tinto chief executive iron ore Andrew Harding agreed there were risk factors associated with FIFO that had the potential to affect the mental health and wellbeing of workers and because of this the company had in place a range of positive mental health programs for employees and families.
However, like many in the resources industry, Harding maintains working FIFO is not, in itself, the direct cause of suicide or mental ill-health.
Assertions from unions and the WA opposition that the FIFO workforce has more mental health issues have been rejected by resources sector body the Chamber of Minerals and Energy in Western Australia. CME deputy chief executive Nicole Roocke said there was no evidence of a higher prevalence of mental health issues in the FIFO workforce compared to WA's general population.
"This makes responsibility for mental health issues a shared one – for individuals, government, community and industry," Roocke said.
Just how much responsibility lies in the hands of the resources industry is a contentious issue.
A discussion paper on FIFO mental health tabled in the WA Parliament in November found Harding's submission for Rio Tinto – which highlighted that mental health was a community-wide issue – underplayed the impact of the unique and significant aspects of working FIFO on an individual's mental health.
The discussion paper found FIFO workers had been clearly shown to be at a heightened risk of mental health problems.
The paper found stressors for FIFO workers included physical exhaustion, being away from friends and family, and mental health stigma.
"One of the biggest issues, one of the things that amplifies the problem, is as soon as you put your hand up and say you've got a mental health issue that's a window seat," McCartney said, using the term FIFO workers use to describe the flight home when they have lost their job.
Western Australia's deputy premier from 1983 to 1988, Mal Bryce, who opposed the state government's relaxation of rules in the mid-1980s that led to the FIFO phenomenon, recently called on the state and Commonwealth governments to work together to address FIFO mental health issues.
"It's become over a period of time one of our most serious social problems," Bryce said. "It's only been partially understood and it's been beneath the surface for half of that time. People have been very reluctant to face the seriousness of some of these implications."
As Australia prepared to become the biggest LNG exporter in the world, it could not afford to miss another opportunity to prioritise the nation's economic gain and improved social infrastructure over the cheapest possible way to maximise company profits, Bryce said.
"Let's not assume that it should be business as usual, or a mere extension of the fly-in fly-out culture," he said. "(It) will require Commonwealth and state governments to be singing from the same hymn sheet, pursuing the same fundamental infrastructure social obligations and hopefully … they will be obligations in the interest of Australia, not just shareholders of corporations."
Western Australian mother and entrepreneur Nicole Ashby has noticed a significant positive shift in the mindset of companies that use FIFO workforces over the past four years. She founded support group FIFO Families during the mining boom.
At first, when she considered how to set up her business she felt limited, because her husband worked FIFO and she had three young children, until a mentor told her if she was having this problem, others were as well. "That was a huge 'ah ha' moment," Ashby said.
"I thought: there's absolutely nothing in terms of connective communities. There's nobody out there helping people navigate the lifestyle," she said.
Her initiative, to help workers manage FIFO lifestyles and connect better with families while they were separated, was not embraced immediately by companies.
"One very big multinational company said to me 'Well, where do we draw the line? Are we responsible for families? We're an employer, not a government agency'," she said.
Through persistent effort, the early support of WA mining contractor Ausdrill, and because of the slowdown in the resources industry, she found companies were more receptive to backing support networks for workers and their families once they recognised it improved productivity and safety and helped them retain valued workers.
Today she has 10 resource companies on her books, including Rio Tinto and global energy group Shell.
"Now companies are chasing us, which is just fantastic and shows the enormous shift in industry," she said.
Ashby is confident the industry is on the right track and that within a few years better policies and procedures around mental health will be in place and strategies to make the lifestyle work will become just as ingrained as safety protocols. "It's not just focusing on the physical safety of workers, but also their wellbeing."
Challenges for partners
For the partners of FIFO workers maintaining good relationships while apart and knowing when to pull the pin on the transient but well-paid lifestyle often throws up a number of challenges.
One New South Wales mother, Stephanie, who did not want her surname used, said that while many believed she and her husband were flush with cash, it wasn't that simple.
Her husband drives three hours from their rural home in Tocumwal to Melbourne to catch a flight to Perth, where his work then pays for his flight to and from the Pilbara.
His extra travel costs them $30,000 a year.
"Everybody thinks we're loaded and in all honesty some weeks we live week to week," she said. "We have expenses that go with it. Financially it is worth it, because the work opportunities aren't around here … but we don't have a lavish lifestyle. We don't have fancy cars ... we go on one holiday once a year."
Having family and friends nearby to help her care for her two young children made the lifestyle easier, she said.
While some people have judged her relationship harshly, telling her if they got divorced it would be their own fault for doing FIFO, she said when her husband came home they spent a week of quality time together, with no work distractions.
"People think 'Oh it must be so hard'. It is hard, but it's not that bad. You wouldn't do it if it wasn't worth it. We've always said if we started having problems [and they] stuck around he'd give up working in the mines," she said.
For the wife of one FIFO worker who lives with her three young children in Geraldton, 400 kilometres north of Perth, the work offered her family perhaps their only real chance to get out of debt.
However, a recent clerical error, which left her husband redundant before the error was fixed several days later, has made them reassess how long they can sustain the lifestyle.
"We want to secure our future, our children's future ... Now that this has happened it's definitely made us realise nobody's safe any more," she said.
She said she wanted to remain in Geraldton with her elderly parents but job options in the area were limited and the time spent apart could be very isolating. "Lonely is definitely the first word you use," she said.
"Your life is very structured because you're on your own. You've got nobody to relieve you ... at night time it's the worst, when you have to get baths and dinner and homework. It's full-on," she said.
"It's really, really hard and it's not for everybody."