Around 1,100 workers at SA company accept pay cut

On the industrial horizon, on Whyalla’s outskirts, all eyes are on one smokestack, the clearer the clouds seen as a sign of progress in the painstaking task of fixing the blast furnace below. In my 73 years in Whyalla, I’ve never known this to happen before. It’s I know it’s very serious. The Liberty Steelworks has been offline now for more than seven weeks since after a planned two day stoppage for routine maintenance, the blast furnace cooled too much and molten metal hardened inside it. Basically from that point onwards we’ve been in a slow methodical recovery mode. We’re very confident of that the recovery happening. Liberty Steel, which is part of UK businessman Sanjeev Gupta’s metals group GFG Alliance, has struck a deal with the unions to shift the around 1100 strong workforce to a temporary day shift Monday to Friday roster rather than working around the clock. It means GFG staff are 20 to 30% down on their usual wage and there’s a flow on to contractors and labour hire firms who might have no work at all where where the contracts have required that to happen, they’ve been suspended or services have just not been acquired. The impacts of the shutdown have already been felt by other businesses in Whyalla. We noticed business dropped straight away. I also have family members affected by it. So you know, we we knew what was coming. Since then it’s been up and down and it’s not all doom and gloom. We know it is gonna get it running. And there are concerns about not only the current problems but what the future holds. I think they’re all on edge, is the feeling around the town. The town needs a place. It’s a hard one to to get going when it gets cold. I don’t have any concerns myself. I know a few guys at work out there. They are a little bit concerned. Liberty says it will have the furnace making steel again by mid to late May. It will then still take quite a while to get the whole works going because there is nothing happening out of the steelworks at the moment, no steel production and then the normal process to get a blast furnace up and running again will take time. But it’s essential that it happens, because Australia needs these steel produced in Wayola and as they work to revive this ageing furnace, Sanjeev Gupta has his eye on what’s next. He’s promised to spend half a billion dollars on an electric furnace to make green steel here, and at the same time he’s under increasing pressure to repay massive amounts of debt. But Mr. Gupta still has the support of the Australian government. It committed $63 million towards the electric furnace earlier this year and the state government has promised $50 million too. When it’s operating in Myalla, its first day works. They’ll get our 50 million. The future is green for this steel city if the promises made are kept and that starts with fixing a 59 year old blast furnace.