In May 2012, the federal government approved an enterprise migration agreement for the Roy Hill iron ore project in the Pilbara, allowing the company to import 1700 workers due to the skills shortage in Australia.

Speaking at the Global Iron & Steel Forecast Conference in Perth yesterday, Fitzgerald said the environment had changed dramatically.

“We are now faced with the difficulty of not having the debate about not employing overseas people, we are now faced with the problem of how, professionally, to manage the number of expressions of interest we have from people who are seeking an opportunity with Roy Hill, whether it be in the construction or the operations phase,” he said.

“And I think it’s a significant responsibility we have to make sure those who are suffering and have seen the wrong side of the downturn, do understand that we are treating their expressions of interest and their applications for jobs with open minds and integrity and it’s a very different approach from being very scared or very worried about whether we’re going to have people joining us.”

Fitzgerald revealed that since December, about 5500 people had registered expressions of interest or applied for jobs at Roy Hill

“We think that’s a significant amount of people – it means that we are seeing something like 600 people applying for one particular style of job, which is a lot of people to treat properly and professionally, and I think that really is a reminder of the human side of what we’re going through,” he said.

Despite no longer needing an EMA, Fitzgerald said the company committed to a training and development program in order to secure it and pushed forward with those initiatives anyway, spending more than $2 million to date.

“It’s our view that many projects have suffered cost and time problems and one of the causes of that is with the high workload, [and] the high expectations on industry, the ability of our construction workforce and our construction supervisory groups to deliver those projects had perhaps fallen aside or due to the scarcity, become very thin,” Fitzgerald said.

“What I’m pleased to say is we’ve had a great level of take-up on [the training programs] and that the results we’ve achieved or more importantly, the results they have achieved, has been significant in terms of improvements in productivity, timeliness and cost.”

Fitzgerald said the landscape had also changed for contractors, but that could deliver benefits.

“I think there’s no doubt that the change in the last 12 months has been significantly more pressure on the contractors – I think that has changed the environment,” he said.

“I think also, the availability of people has probably resulted in a slight shift in productivity in addition to what we’ve done, so I think that obviously from a Roy Hill point of view, we’ve awarded the bulk of our contracts, in fact virtually all of them, so we aren’t going to get that benefit because we already awarded lump sum contracts.

“I think what it does mean is that the contractors who have been successful will have an opportunity through better productivity, more availability of people, to deliver their works more efficiently and therefore, lower their risk, which I think will make everyone happy.”

There are 2400 workers onsite at Roy Hill, with the workforce to peak at 3600.