Mass job cuts loom for Rio Tinto’s workforce

Employees at Rio’s St Georges Terrace office are bracing for a sweeping job cull that chief executive Simon Trott alluded to in December. General manager of iron ore mine productivity, Scott Wilkinson, is rumoured to be retiring from Rio imminently amid a large round of redundancies kicking off before July 1. Mr Wilkinson formerly oversaw the company’s Brockman operations, which sustain about 2500 jobs across four integrated mines and make up a large chunk of the company’s Pilbara iron ore output. Sources close to Rio say upwards of 20 per cent of its Perth white-collar workforce could be axed in the near-term. Mr Trott, speaking to media after the company’s AGM on Wednesday, declined to reveal the scale of the Perth office job losses or how long the latest wave of redundancies would last. “We continue to make changes to our business, as we’re doing this year, as we did last year and as we did the year before, because we should always be looking at our business and thinking about how do we structure activities so they’re efficient and effective,” he said. Initially, there was speculation that the cuts would flow through to fly-in, fly-out jobs at the company’s Pilbara iron ore mines. But Mr Trott said those front line roles will be shielded from the purge, with Rio shifting more operational responsibility from offices to mine sites.