Foreign Worker Calgary

Australia's Big Dig for Foreign Workers | PINOY OFW

Lucille Lievaux, a 25-year-old French geologist, commutes to work on a plane, a 1,300-km journey from Australia’s Indian Ocean city of Perth to the mining town of Karratha, a smudge of suburbia on the continent’s barren northwest coast. Slim, blonde and passionate about her job, she sits in Karratha’s busy single-storey airport, waiting for a jet to take her home. She has swapped her hard-hat and orange-striped overalls for a short-sleeved cotton top, jeans and sneakers. Wearing her sunglasses like a hair-band, she looks out of place in a departure lounge crowded mostly with unshaven men. Only the dirt beneath her short fingernails and tanned, weathered hands would suggest she has something in common. “Australia is like an El Dorado,” says Lievaux, who came a year ago on a holiday. She now nets $5,000 a month, working two weeks out of every three at the Whim Creek prospect, an old open-cut copper mine dug out of the red rocky plain. “It’s so easy, so easy to find a job here as a geologist.”

And it’s so hard for Australia to find enough workers like Lievaux to sustain its mining boom. The tightening labour market is driving up wages, and combined with the resurgent Aussie dollar, is putting pressure on the entire manufacturing sector.

Lievaux may earn about $60,000 a year after tax and be chauffeured to work in a jet, but she is not particularly well paid by the standards of Karratha, an Aboriginal word meaning “good country, and other remote boom towns. A mine supervisor can earn in excess of $200,000, more than the head of the U.S. Federal Reserve. A truck-driver’s salary easily runs into six figures. A construction worker can make over $150,000, more than a doctor or lawyer.

“You can get girls cleaning at the mine camps and they can easily earn $100,000 a year,” says Tracy Reis, 42, a travel agent based in Karratha. The reason for this labour shortage, and the sky-high wages that come with it, is simple: Australia, with a population of 22 million, does not have the workforce to exploit its enormous natural bounty — at least not at the pace required to satisfy Asia’s hunger for resources. The mining and resources industry, including oil and gas, has roughly $400 billion in new projects on the drawing board in Australia and will need another roughly 70,000 workers over the next five years alone, according to government estimates.

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