Australia’s biggest gold miner tops up childcare workers’ salaries to keep them out of the Super Pit

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The owners of Western Australia’s largest gold mine have been topping up childcare workers’ salaries and subsidising their rent to prevent those workers leaving their job for a highly paid mining gig.

Northern Star, which owns the Kalgoorlie Super Pit gold mine, have been running the scheme for more than three years.

Northern Star’s KCGM Super Pit mine in Kalgoorlie.

The company gives The Y childcare centre money to top up annual salaries by about $10,000 to $15,000, and provide rental subsidies to ease housing costs and keep workers in their roles.

Northern Star’s KCGM growth general manager Nick Strong said attracting and retaining new families was tough if they didn’t have good access to childcare.

“There are more childcare places than there are child carers, so it’s not a lack of buildings and infrastructure, it’s a lack of the carer ratio that’s required in a childcare so they can’t actually meet those ratios, which then reduces the amount of spots,” he said.

“So the first problem to deal with is getting more carers interested or employed into those roles so that the children can actually be looked after.

“It is a real critical issue for us in order to release the worker from their domestic life to come work for us if their kids can’t get care.

“It’s kind of levelling them up to sort of make being a child-carer in Kalgoorlie competitive with being a child-carer anywhere else because the rent Kalgoorlie is astronomically high.

“When they’re on a lower wage base and having to pay higher costs, it just destroys it, they say, ‘If I’m going to be a childcare worker, why would I do it here?’”

Northern Star first announced its partnership with The Y in 2021, but Strong revealed the staff salary details on a Chamber of Minerals and Energy media mine tour this week.

Northern Star estimates at least 50 per cent of Kalgoorlie’s 30,000 residents have some employment connection with Northern Star’s KCGM operation, which includes the Super Pit, the giant mine that cuts deep into the earth right next to the Goldfields town.

Strong is acutely aware of the irony of the situation faced by KCGM, which is desperate for workers, with more than 100 vacancies unfilled for more than three years, and would hire anyone off the street if they could pass a drug test and have a can-do attitude.

But when the company hires a Kalgoorlie local from an essential service role, it puts pressure on the whole town and makes it less desirable for new people – and potential new employees at KCGM – to move there.

“We see the problem with baggage handlers at the airport. If they can’t get a baggage handler, we can’t unload our plane, and we can’t get people onto the plane,” Strong said.

“I’ve seen Woolworths get to the point of FIFOing checkout people into Kalgoorlie to work at the checkout so that our staff can buy groceries.”

The obvious solution to build more houses is difficult because there isn’t the construction workforce to build houses en masse, and costs have also ballooned.

According to REIWA data, Kalgoorlie’s vacancy rate has improved somewhat from October last year – 0.4 per cent to 1.2 per cent – but that is still half the vacancy rate in Perth, which itself is in the midst of a housing crisis.

REIWA figures show rent prices have more than doubled from 2020 to $685 per week.

Strong said Kalgoorlie was full to the brim.

Northern Star’s workforce is 95 per cent residential, but its attempts to build 1100-bed FIFO camps across two sites have been met with controversy.

Strong said the camps were necessary to bring in specialist workers working on its $1.5 billion processing plant expansion and future mine expansions.

Along Great Eastern Highway, rare earths producer Lynas is not having the same issues with staff accommodation thanks to its smaller workforce and suite of company-secured rentals.

“We’ve secured our own rented houses. Most of them have been families who are wanting to come to lifestyle and move to Kalgoorlie and ended up either renting their own house or buying,” Lynas Kalgoorlie rare earths processing plant operations manager Marcelle Watson said.

The City of Kalgoorlie was approached for comment.

The reporter travelled to the Goldfields as a guest of the Chamber of Minerals and Energy WA.