BEN HARVEY: How miners can make FIFO work suck less

For something that’s part of the fabric of Australian society, fly-in, fly-out mining work is a relatively new cultural phenomenon.

With its vast geography and bountiful mineral deposits, WA was destined to become ground-zero for this employment trend. Yet the first time the FIFO acronym was used in print wasn’t until November 20, 1999.

“Established mining towns such as Kalgoorlie-Boulder have escaped the negative impact of the fly-in, fly-out trend in the mining industry,” read the first paragraph in that Kalgoorlie Miner report.

Over the next four years, FIFO appeared just 15 times in WA newspaper articles.

To put that in perspective, over the past four years, the word has been printed 988 times.

In the early noughties the concept was so novel The West Australian newspaper sent a reporter on a swing at a gold mine to report from inside a camp.

The trend of working two weeks on and one week off (or the increasingly popular eight days on and six days off roster) happened organically, with little official guidance.

Nobody knows precisely how many FIFO workers are on the tools at any one time but the figure of 80,000 has been floated and nobody thinks it’s outrageously low or high.

That’s a lot of people living together in the middle of nowhere.

And a lot of families left without a parent for a significant portion of the year.

Many FIFO camps look flash but boil it down and you are talking about a lifestyle more akin to a military base than a resort.

Talk to any seasoned FIFO worker and they will mention monotony and boredom and the loss of identity and privacy when they’re living in a worksite village.

The workers take that angst home with them. And when they finally do get home they often feel like strangers in their own house because things change in a fortnight.

Kids get taller. Furniture gets re-arranged. Spouses have new interests.

Perth academic Jack Tooley reckons Australia has underestimated FIFO’s social impact. Dr Tooley is well-qualified to hold that view because he has spent more time getting inside the heads of FIFO workers than just about anyone else in the country.

His modelling and simulation company InSite Analytics has interviewed 2000 FIFO workers to compile a 500,000 data point model (peer-reviewed, at that) of village life.

His co-authored paper FIFO Camps For Well-Being makes it very clear that the built environment at work camps matters more than anything else.

“For too long, the mining industry has attempted to address psychosocial wellbeing in FIFO accommodation through supplementary services and reactive interventions, without adequately addressing the physical environments in which workers spend much of their lives,” the architectural sociologist explains.

“InSite Analytics’ research indicates that approximately 60 per cent of the variation in FIFO workers’ psychosocial wellbeing outcomes can be attributed to the built environment of accommodation villages themselves.

“The implications are significant: the design of these villages is not simply an aesthetic or amenity consideration, but a fundamental determinant of workers’ psychological health, social connection and operational performance.

“The built environment establishes the conditions within which management practices, support services and wellbeing initiatives must operate. No amount of supplementary programming can fully compensate for an environment that systematically contributes to the problems those programs are intended to resolve.”

Dr Tooley was one of many interested parties who made a submission to a recent WA Government review of minimum standards at work camps.

A new draft code has called for workers to get bigger beds, have control of their own air-conditioning, protection from random room searches and access to drinking water cooled “at or below 24C”.

Rooms should have a desk and chair, a lamp, adequate power and USB points, blackout blinds and insulation suited to the local climate. Doors should have a deadlock and peephole.

Night-shift and day-shift workers should sleep in different areas away from “roads, laundries, mess halls and recreation areas” and bosses should not enter a worker’s room without consent unless carrying out a welfare check.

Dr Tooley thinks many proposals are promising but is urging designers and policymakers to not lose sight of the most important determinant of on-site wellbeing – the camp itself.

“Environments are not passive backdrops to human behaviour,” he says.

“They shape opportunities for privacy, autonomy, social interaction, restoration and perceived safety.

“For FIFO workers, whose accommodation is also their temporary home, these conditions are particularly consequential. The draft code represents an opportunity to move the industry beyond superficial compliance and reactive wellbeing initiatives towards evidence-based, preventative design.

“Getting it right means establishing a framework that recognises the built environment as a primary psychosocial risk consideration, while giving operators the flexibility to demonstrate how their design decisions deliver meaningful improvements without imposing unnecessary costs.”

The costs are significant. You won’t get much change from $300 million for a 1200-bed camp and Australian resources companies are building 10 new ones of those every year. Another 30-odd are fully or partially renovated.

Dr Tooley says designers don’t necessarily need to spend more money, they need to spend money smarter. Better sound insulation might be a more prudent investment than on-site entertainment.

“People appreciate a good night’s sleep more than a golf simulator,” he says.