Thousands of wharfies and construction workers today flooded the front steps of the WA's Parliament House in opposition to foreign workers being used on resources projects and what they claim are insufficient moves to upskill locals.
Australian Maritime Workers Union WA state secretary Steve McCartney told the crowd more had to be done to train Australia's youth and protect the struggling manufacturing sector.
"There's $220 billion worth of project work yet to go in Western Australia, there's millions worth of manufacturing work going to India and China and there's thousands of kids on the Kwinana strip who can't get a job," he said.
"At the end of the day it's our gas, it's our rocks and it's our jobs."
Workers from the MUA were joined by the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, among others.
The group are preparing to march up to the headquarters of Gina Rinehart's Hancock Prospecting in Perth to protest the private company's move to bring 1700 foreign workers onto the Roy Hill project in the Pilbara on an enterprise migration agreement.
Last week Roy Hill chief executive Barry Fitzgerald defended the company's EMA, saying the project would still need more than 6000 Australian workers over its life.
"The fact is that we need to find a lot of Australian labour through ourselves and our contractors because that's the first part of delivering this confidence to our financiers that we can build the project," he said last week.
"It's a risk management strategy and it's something that we need to do, to put in place, to convince the financiers that we have a total solution, not a part solution."
More to come.
Read more: http://www.watoday.com.au/wa-news/workers-rally-for-more-locals-on-resource-projects-20120704-21guo.html#ixzz1zcxUxwRf