Grosvenor underground coal mine at Moranbah, central Queensland, last year the site of a month-long inferno, has been unsealed in preparation for workers to return. The Mining and Energy Union (MEU) has endorsed the reopening drive by owner Anglo American, which is anxious to restart operations to facilitate its pending sale of the mine.
The MEU has lifted its ban on entry to the mine, allowing Queensland Mines Rescue Service (QMRS) personnel to begin “preliminary reconnaissance inspections” last week. This was described as a “significant milestone” by the mine’s general manager, Shane McDowall, who said, while mining would not resume immediately, workers would re-enter the mine once safety inspections were finished.
MEU official Jason Hill told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), “There’s nothing to say it can’t return into a full production. It’s just a matter of identifying what happened.”
“What happened” was that, for the second time in four years, a methane gas explosion and fire placed the lives of Grosvenor mine workers in immediate danger.
At around 5:40 a.m. on June 29, 2024, a group of Grosvenor miners working on a longwall face some 500 metres underground saw a flame zip down the tunnel away from them.
At the time, MEU general vice president Steven Smyth noted how close workers came to serious injury or death: “[T]he saving grace is, if there is any in this whole situation, it’s that the flame went down the return and not across the coalface where the workers were.”
The workers then had to “self-escape,” scrambling in near-total darkness—power having been cut to reduce the chance of further ignition—to reach vehicles before making the hour-long journey back to the surface. Another worker, alone in a different section of the mine, was not aware of the fire until he made a chance call to the surface to inquire about the time and was told to evacuate.
While no workers were injured, the fire burned for the entire month of July, spewing vast clouds of toxic smoke from the mine’s ventilation shafts. Local residents were told to stay indoors to minimise their exposure.
The mine has been closed since the fire, with the majority of the more than 1,100 workers employed there redeployed to other operations in the region, according to the ABC.
Last year’s fire prompted renewed questions over the safety of the mine after five workers were seriously injured in a methane explosion in 2020, sustaining horrific and life-threatening burns to their upper torsos and airways.
While no charges were laid against Anglo American over the 2020 incident, the investigation revealed that decisions made by the company to maximise production and profit helped to create the conditions for the explosion.
Though the official government inquiry was largely a whitewash, it did reveal that Anglo American enforced a rate of extraction that continually produced methane gas levels more than twice what the mine’s gas drainage system could handle. The company also skipped other safety measures and risk assessments before starting work on the longwall where the incident occurred, in order to avoid costly delays.
Moreover, the company ignored repeated warnings from workers of the dangerous conditions. The inquiry heard that, in the eight weeks before the blast, there were 14 reported “high potential incidents” of methane exceedance at the mine. One of the injured miners, Wayne Sellars, told the inquiry that when workers complained to management about the methane levels, “they’d come back and they’d tell us to keep going.”
Giving workers further reason to be wary of Anglo American’s posturing over safety now is the context in which its push to reopen the Grosvenor mine is taking place. The company has lined up a deal to sell its Australian metallurgical coal mines, including Grosvenor, for $5.8 billion, but the prospective buyer is reportedly trying to back out of the arrangement or negotiate a cheaper price.
Australian Mining Monthly reported in May that Peabody Energy had notified Anglo American of a “material adverse change” affecting the acquisition plan, in response to the shuttering of another mine, Moranbah North, 10 kilometres to the north, again because of an underground fire, in March. With both mines closed, Anglo American’s total Australian metallurgical coal output in the June quarter was 2.06 million tonnes (Mt), 51 percent lower than for the same period in 2024.
In 2021, more than 200 Grosvenor workers signed a union-initiated petition calling for the dismissal of the mine’s senior management, who, they wrote, “have given us no reason to believe they have addressed the culture of poor safety or that they have put in place measures that will prevent a repeat disaster.”
The union has provided no explanation as to why that assessment is no longer the case. The MEU bureaucracy, for whom the petition was never anything more than a cynical diversion, is once again lining up with Anglo American to force workers back into the mine, under the pretext that an investigation has been carried out and lessons have been learned.
The reality is that the MEU is just as anxious as the company to cover up its own role overseeing unsafe conditions at Grosvenor and throughout the mining industry. Following almost every serious incident, the union bleats that its warnings to management of unsafe conditions were ignored.
But it is the unions that serve as an industrial police force of management, keeping workers on the job and ensuring that their safety concerns do not find expression in strikes or other industrial action that would impact on company profits. They use the same mechanisms to enforce corporate and government demands for cuts to real wages, conditions and job security, against the opposition of workers.
The MEU and all other union bureaucracies play this role because they fully support, and are an integral part of, the capitalist system, under which every consideration, including the health and lives of workers, is subordinate to the transformation of labour into profit. It is this ruthless system, the only goal of which is to produce ever-greater wealth for a tiny elite, that is ultimately responsible for all the predictable and preventable deaths and injuries that are falsely labelled industrial “accidents.”
This means that, to improve safety and put a stop to preventable deaths and serious injuries in the mining industry, workers need to take matters into their own hands. Rank-and-file committees, democratically controlled by workers, must be built in every workplace to assess conditions, formulate demands and enforce safety measures. Workers, not management, must decide when and if it is safe to re-enter a mine after an incident.
The fight for safe working conditions in the mining industry and more broadly should be connected to a struggle by the working class against capitalism itself. This means a fight for a socialist perspective, and to establish workers’ governments to place all essential industries, including mining, under public ownership democratic workers’ control, to meet social need, not private profit.