Trust me, if they are regularly away for long periods, it becomes more like shaking hands with a stranger. And eventually other interests intervene, and the relationship withers. There are psychological studies on this.

FIFO is very hard on women with small children, especially if they are holding down a job as well, while hubby shows up periodically for his “well-earned rest”. Twelve hour shifts are certainly hard yakka, and after a few weeks most people are exhausted and looking forward to a rest. Nonetheless, resentment and anger eventually erode the base of the relationship.

I’ve watched it happen often over the years, and heard the woman’s side at length over coffees. The men no doubt feel they are taking the best job opportunity and providing for their family as best they can, so they would resent being resented. It is bad news all round.

Regarding the personalities and whether the relationship is strengthened, I would say that you may be viewing it with the goggles of the previous generation, when women stayed at home.

Shell International had a very patronising attitude to “Shell wives”, that they should be happy to “go on assignment”, and the women were inflexible and uncooperative if they didn’t thrive. The men who were stupid enough to buy into that line soon found their well-qualified and under-valued wives with packed bags and asking for a divorce. “But we are making heaps of money, honey, why aren’t you happy?”

These days, unless the woman has a meaningful role, IN HER EYES, then she will not be best pleased with getting dragged to some remote corner. I believe that it is imperative for a company to deal with the family as a unit, and ensure that there is a possibility of meaningful work for the other partner.

That does NOT mean, as Shell managers degradingly suggested on numerous occasions to the wives of colleagues, that highly skilled professionals and managers should “have a baby”, “have another baby”, “take a secretarial position”, or “do some voluntary work for the poor”. The women concerned were enraged, justifiably, and their hapless husbands were left with an invidious choice.

You would see the point immediately, if the tables are turned and the woman has a brilliant posting at the expense of the husbands successful career. In my experience, most male managers are keen to know how the man will take the news, especially if there is no equivalent job available for him, but they are not so concerned vice versa.

To state the bleeding obvious, you cannot buy love, happiness and fulfillment with expat money, or remote location money. It should be obvious that this is now a major issue for relocating families, but with a mindset of “it depends on their personality”, the outcome is often an inevitable lose-lose-lose (employee, partner and company).

Less certain about the effects of FIFO since I met few of the wives. I think once again that personality, roster details and the circumstances of the person who stayed at home are important. Previous rosters may affect the attitude. Moving from a family unfriendly roster to a more friendly roster can have a big affect on feelings. My wife doesn’t like me working FIFO and prefers less time away and shorter times away. Some marriages may actually work better when the husband is away for more time. Gives the wife more independance and the brief visits may be something like another honeymoon. Some of the men in this situation appear to be a lot more comfortable with the company of men compared with wives. Some construction marriages break up if the husband gets a city job. One of my construction fiends commented that he and his wife conciously change the way they work when he changes to and from city and site work.
Agree with your general comments about the price of fuel.

John D, if you really want to know the impact on families of living in small communities, ask the women, not the men. They are generally too busy at work (and mining is still very much a man’s world) to really notice the effect on the families, even including their own wives.

I have also some 6 months direct experience with weekly commuting in the oil industry, and watched the effects of FIFO on the lives of colleagues over many years. Some advantages, but plenty of disadvantages. Bad for relationships.

I would say that neither life in a remote small township, nor a life of commuting, is a long-term option for most people.

I wasn’t so much concerned with footprint, John D, but with the rising cost. CSIRO has a report which suggests that fuel prices could go as high as $8/litre due to an oil crunch and the slow adoption of low consumption alternatives.

Some mines might not stand the increase in operating cost for their mining fleet, rail costs, FIFO etc. I wonder what numbers they are using in their sensitivity modelling – $2/litre might not cut the mustard, in terms of risk management?

I understand that Rio is looking at remote operation of their crushing plants, rail and possibly even the ore trucks. The last one seems a bit of a stretch – driverless trucks hairing around the site???

Of course, some operations are simpler and less manpower-intensive than others. Can you really see the entire Mount Isa operations (underground mining, concentrators and smelters) being run on remote from Brisbane, for example?

I believe Rio have considered changing fuel to CNG, but I don’t know what they concluded. Probably on the backburner after the oil price dived. Their electric power is from gas turbines, not coal-fired. They have installed thermally-efficient heat-pump water heaters in the latest camps, and worked at minimising the heat load on the dongas (to reduce aircon load), which is rather progressive of them!

At the moment, our mining companies are MAJOR users of diesel, and this is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. It is an essential component of their operations. Why don’t they band together and lobby the government for Gas-to-Diesel? Don’t they see the crunch coming?

The impact of FIFO on carbon footprint is a bit harder to comment on and would depend on roster, distance of mine from accomodation etc. At least some of the bus in bus out mines I have worked in out from Mackay would have a smaller commute footprint than the average urban worker. I cannot make general comments about mining and reducing fuel consumption but the companies I have worked for were certainly into it. In addition, some of the advances will reduce the need for workers to be on site. For example, Rio now has its crusher controllers working in Perth and is putting a lot of effort into automating its trucking fleet. (Don’t have details.)
Moz @36: You are right that the number of hours a person can effectively work vary from the nature of the work as well as the person. Changes in working arrangements need to take account of this. One of the interesting things i have noticed from my own work is that I can work effectively much longer hours on manager work than I can on detailed design calculations. A problem when macho managers can’t understand why you can’t work the hours they do.

There is another point though, regarding FIFO as you implied “easier for the family to live in places like Mackay instead of mining towns”. It seems to me that FIFO is the progeny of cheap oil, and a society that prefers to live in cities rather than outback or mining towns.

The cheap oil situation will not last much longer.
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So what will be the impact on the mining industry in a few years time? Any guesses?

What if oil is rationed, due to global shortages in 5-10 years time? How long would it take to get a Gas-to-Diesel plant designed and built for the mining fleets in the Pilbara, 5 – 10 years? If so, then they should be starting on it immediately, shouldn’t they? What are the mining companies thinking about this strategic issue?

I’ve worked in IT for 20 years as well as random manual-ish jobs. With programming as with most creative jobs the problem is that creative thinking is very demanding and most people can only do it well for a few hours a day. Working from home has meant that I have peace and quiet to work at peak productivity more often, but the flip side is that it’s also intensely interactive at times (much of the value comes from explaining ideas to others and getting their reactions). So a balance is good.

The other side is that I’ve seen more disasters from long days programming than I’ve seen successes. So I fear the 4×10 idea would not help. It’s bad enough having “heros” doing long days sometimes without letting them commit to it as a lifestyle. I’ve seen the same thing in any job that requires thought. Stamping out widgets or answering the phone can be done without too much thought even after 10 or 12 hours on the job, but dealing with constantly chaging situations or even just being polite to customers is much harder.

Also, while a lot of programming work can be fairly menial and thus done in long days or other low-thought times, the tendency these days is to outsource that work. So instead of a local doing it for ten hours a day, two Filipinos do it for 8 hours a day each at half the cost.

In manual jobs I’ve had (and used) pretty extreme flexibility. One place I communicated with my boss via nots for weeks at a time. I’d work during the cool part of the day, he’d crawl in around lunchtime and do whatever it is managers do. Currently I’m aiming to make the bike shop work split shifts for my own convenience and incidentally to save them laying out ten grand or so on another mechanic’s station. I’m happy to start work at 5am and finish at 2pm, we’re looking for someone to work the 12pm-8pm shift. There’s a side benefit – not being interrupted by customers makes us more productive, the flip side being that if there is a problem we can’t ring the customer and ask what to do at 5am. Well, we can, but…

As a manager my main roster related concerns were that I had the necessary number of people at work for each production shift and something close to a full maintenance crew on shutdowns. I would not have been particularly concerned if production and maintenance workers had come up with some arrangement that took more account of individual needs.

Obviously, consultants and technical specialists in many fields are highly mobile and measured more by results, rather than hours clocked in the office. They have much higher levels of flexibility.

However, there are still many people who do not have that luxury, and are unlikely to have it in the near future. Think of the plant operators in the refineries (oil, alumina, etc), manufacturing plants, processing plants, mines and concentrators, etc. Think of the ore truck drivers in the Pilbara. Think of the retail workers, Coles checkout, storemen and delivery drivers. Think of the tourism industry workers.

I’m sorry John D, but I think you are imagining the world to be populated by highly-skilled, specialised workers such as your good self.

My experience in recent years suggests that more and more of us will have more choice about our working arrangements as time goes on. I am talking about years, not generations.

Has anyone any comments about the effect of changes in working arrangements on business efficiency and profits?