Mining brings the cash, but not the love

The heartache of mine workers in places such as Kalgoorlie is a headache for companies. Photo / Don Pugh

Ten minutes' walk from Australia's largest open-pit gold mine, 35-year-old driller Matt Brown swigs a beer in the bar of the Rock Inn Hotel and laments one of the biggest problems of the mining boom: a shortage of girlfriends.

"You get lonely," says Brown, who explores for gold and iron ore with Westralian Diamond Drillers, based in the dust-coated town of Kalgoorlie, 600km from Perth. "Relationships are the hardest thing about mining."

The heartache in places like Kalgoorlie and the Queensland coal town of Glenden, where there are 23 unmarried men in their 40s for each single woman, is a headache for companies like Rio Tinto, the world's second-largest mining company, that are trying to attract workers.

The biggest commodities boom since the 1850s Gold Rush has sapped the supply of Australians willing to adopt Brown's lifestyle, even with wages double the national average.

To persuade workers to join, companies offer extras such as seven-hour, round-trip flights to cities every few weeks, satellite phones to keep miners connected with loved ones, counselling services, and even flying in families for employees who keep mines going over the Christmas holiday.

"It's a wonderful life for many people, but for many people there's a crippling isolation," said Gervase Greene, a Perth-based spokesman for Rio Tinto's iron-ore operations.

"You've got to think outside the square to access workers and keep them in the workforce. There's still a labour shortage."

Meanwhile, higher labour expenses are raising expansion costs, Rio Tinto said. Its workforce more than doubled in five years to 76,894 at the end of 2010. Australia's unemployment rate was 5.1 per cent in July, almost half that of the US, Bloomberg data show.

Rising wages are feeding inflation, forcing the central bank to keep its benchmark interest rate at 4.75 per cent, the highest in the developed world, even as domestic spending slows. Miners' wages have risen 33 per cent in the past five years in Australia, to A$2113 ($2673) a week, or more than double the national average, according to data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

That's almost twice as much as miners in the US, who are paid an average of A$1236 a week, figures from the Bureau of Labour Statistics show.

The Reserve Bank of Australia said "the widespread increase in cost pressures" was a threat to inflation, in minutes of this month's meeting released on August 16.

"It's not just a threat to inflation, it's a threat to business," said Nigel Stapledon, a lecturer at the University of New South Wales's Australian School of Business in Sydney.

"What happens in mining feeds through to costs in all sectors."

The difficulty in holding down a relationship is one of the factors driving demands for further pay rises in mining, said Stephen Smyth, a president in the 120,000-member Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, which is organising strikes this month at BHP Billiton mines.

Tim Douglas, a mining engineer with Macmahon Holdings, said his job was incompatible with a long-term relationship. He works eight-day stints at Rio Tinto's Argyle Diamond Mine in the East Kimberley region mine with six-day breaks in Perth, a 3-hour flight away.

"You've got to pretty much give up your life," said Douglas, 24, who split up with his girlfriend in February. "A lot of my friends have been eyeing some quick cash in the mines, but it's not all it's cracked up to be."

That's making it harder for Roger Edwards, managing director of Kalgoorlie-based Acorn Recruitment, to fill vacancies. He has 120 roles open for electricians, welders, labourers and drillers, paying as much as A$5000 a week, and just 14 tradesmen in town qualified to do the work, he said. There may be a shortfall of 35,800 tradesmen by 2015 on resources projects, the National Resources Sector Employment Taskforce said in a 2010 report.

"The only thing that can keep us going is getting people from elsewhere," said Edwards, who supplies workers for BHP and the nearby Super Pit, owned by Barrick Gold and Newmont Mining. "But the fly-in, fly-out workers destroy the community. They're the ones who go crazy. The number of breakups we see is unbelievable."

Kelly Quirke, a BHP spokeswoman, said the company wouldn't comment on what it's doing to attract workers.

A mile from the Super Pit - deep enough to swallow the Empire State Building - miners' fluorescent-orange safety shirts glow through the windows of bars along Burt St, many served by barmaids dressed only in black-lace underwear.

Edwards isn't the only one struggling to get workers. Two blocks away, at Langtrees brothel, the manageress who calls herself Dylan Delights is drafting in staff from as far afield as Ireland and New Zealand.

"Just come and have some fun and make as much money as you can," she said on the phone to a woman in Tasmania.

"What was your name, sweetheart? My name's Dylan. I'm the madam."

Most clients are miners and many are married or in a relationship, said Dylan, sucking on a cigarette. An hour with a girl costs A$350 and a prostitute with as many as six customers a night can earn A$10,000 a week, said Dylan, 23. Prostitution is legal in Australia.

Some miners turn to the internet. Web matchmaker eHarmony.com Inc. has identified "Love Hotspots," with mining towns such as Queensland's Mt Isa top of the list.

RSVP, Australia's largest online dating service, said 14 per cent more users signed up in the past 12 months, taking its clients to 1.8 million. In Kalgoorlie, the number jumped 76 per cent.

Bernard Salt, a partner at KPMG in Melbourne, said the mining boom was exacerbating a history of gender isolation in Australia, where 22.7 million people populate an island almost as large as the US.

The mining industry employed 214,000 workers as of May, government data show, 86 per cent of them men.

"It's a uniquely Australian issue," said Salt, whose books include Man Drought and Other Social Issues of the New Century.

Women, who a generation ago tended to stay in remoter towns and marry in their early 20s, are adding to the imbalance by moving to cities for work and education, he said.

When they get there, they find a shortage of men.

"I've got a bunch of single girlfriends and we're out there looking, but we've been scratching our heads wondering where all the decent men are," said Lara Iacusso, a 41-year-old former corporate-finance partner, who moved to Sydney from Perth more than three years ago.

Brett Gilbert, a chef at Fortescue Metals Group's Solomon iron-ore project, plans to publish a book this year, The Fly-In Fly-Out Bachelor: A FIFO Bachelor's Guide to Success With Women, after overcoming his own depression.

"This whole industry is plagued with guys who probably want to be more successful with women," said Gilbert.

At the Rock Inn Hotel, and without a girlfriend after two years in Kalgoorlie, Brown comforts himself with his pay packet. "For a lot of us, it's the money. If you want to work, there's a job here for you."

- Bloomberg