Give up the right to change a remote roster on your own
Energy employers guard the right to extend offshore and remote rosters as essential operational flexibility. I argue that, in remote work, the roster is the core of the employment bargain and should be changed only through a joint process advised by fatigue evidence, even though that costs money.
Every offshore and remote energy operation I know treats roster flexibility as an operational necessity. Maintenance campaigns overrun, weather closes flight windows and a platform cannot be left without its technicians. So the agreement usually lets management extend a swing at short notice, and management usually defends that right as fiercely as anything else in bargaining. My position, after five years in offshore LNG and a long career before that in coal and construction, is that in remote work the roster is the central term of the employment relationship, and that employers should give up the right to change it unilaterally. Roster changes should go through a joint process advised by independent fatigue evidence, with disputes resolved by the agreement's dispute procedure rather than by notice.
I accept that this costs money. I think it costs less than the alternative, which is paid for in resignations, fatigue incidents and disputes, and much of which never appears in the budget line that roster flexibility protects.
What a swing extension costs a household
At Tessaline Energy our offshore employees worked fourteen days on and fourteen off. The agreement in force until 2019 allowed the company to extend a swing to twenty-one days during maintenance campaigns with seven days' notice. We used that right four times in two years. Each time, the decision was sensible on the operating plan. Each time, several hundred households absorbed a week of extra absence with a week's warning: childcare rearranged, a partner's shifts swapped, a family event missed.
I asked our people team to read two years of exit interviews from experienced offshore technicians. Swing extensions appeared in a disproportionate share of them, often as the moment someone began looking for a job onshore. Our fatigue data showed something less obvious. Errors and near-miss reports rose in the final days of extended swings, and employees told us their sleep at home was worse in the weeks after an extension, when they were trying to repay time to their families. None of this was visible in the operating budget, which recorded the extension as a saving on relief crews.
Why we handed the roster to a committee
In bargaining in 2019 the unions' main claim was to remove the extension right, and protected action ballots were in prospect. Our chief operating officer wanted to keep the right and offer more money. He had a good argument: maintenance campaigns depended on it, and relief crews would cost several million dollars a year. I proposed something different. The company would give up unilateral extensions entirely. Roster changes would require agreement through a joint committee of four company and four employee representatives, advised by an independent fatigue scientist, with unresolved disputes going to the Fair Work Commission under the agreement's dispute procedure. In exchange, the unions agreed to a fixed annual calendar of maintenance campaigns, published a year in advance.
Our chief executive supported the proposal after hearing the operating objections in full. The cost was about A$4.1 million a year in additional relief crews. The agreement was approved by 84% of employees who voted, without industrial action, and turnover among experienced offshore technicians fell from 11% to 6% over the next two years. I cannot attribute all of that fall to the roster change, because we also changed progression rules in the same period. Employees who left, however, stopped naming the roster.
The arithmetic deserves a fairer hearing than it usually receives. Our relief-crew cost of A$4.1 million a year looked large beside the budget line it replaced. Set against the cost of replacing experienced offshore technicians, it looked different. Recruiting, training and certifying a replacement for an experienced control-room or maintenance technician took us six to nine months and, by our estimate, about A$180,000 before the new person was fully productive. The fall in turnover meant roughly twenty fewer replacements a year among about 400 experienced technicians. I would not claim the two sums cancel exactly. The comparison belongs in the paper a board sees, and in my experience it rarely appears there.
The committee's real test came in March 2020. Quarantine rules made fortnightly crew changes impractical. Most offshore operators lengthened swings at short notice. Ours did so through the committee, which agreed temporary twenty-eight-day swings with fatigue controls and additional leave in nine days. Employees accepted the change because their representatives had shaped it and because the fatigue adviser had set its limits. I have talked to people at other operators who made similar changes by notice under their existing rights. Many of their changes were lawful and some were unavoidable, but the resentment lasted for years.
The limits of joint control
The model has weaknesses, and I would not present it as a template. Our committee had no deadline for decisions, and some routine roster questions took three months to resolve. That is too slow for an operation, and I would set time limits from the start. Joint control also covered only our employees. Contractors worked beside them on rosters the committee never saw, which created two classes of worker on the same deck. I would bring the principal contractors into the process, at least as observers with a right to raise fatigue concerns.
There are situations where unilateral change is unavoidable: a cyclone evacuation, a medical emergency or an incident response. Our agreement dealt with those as emergencies, with a review by the committee afterwards. The point is not to remove management's ability to act in a crisis. It is to stop treating ordinary operating convenience as a crisis.
I now apply the same principle to transmission construction, where crews travel for long stretches and a project director can be tempted to extend a stint to recover a schedule. Our agreements at Pennardine set the travel cycle and limit changes to agreed exceptions. The cost is real, and our project directors remind me of it.
My argument to boards of energy companies with remote workforces is a modest one. Ask management how often it has extended rosters in the past two years, what notice it gave and what happened to resignations and incident reports afterwards. If the answers are uncomfortable, the flexibility you are paying to protect may be costing more than it saves.