A career spent reading rosters as decisions about people

In the winter of 1998 I was eighteen months into my first job, as a graduate industrial relations officer at the larger of Haverell Generation's two coal-fired stations in the Hunter. A boiler outage had run long, and the maintenance crews were working sixteen-hour shifts to bring the unit back. Late one night a second-year apprentice fell asleep driving home and left the road. He recovered, slowly. The overtime had been approved, recorded and paid exactly as the site agreement required, and I had checked it. What nobody had asked was whether a nineteen-year-old should drive forty minutes after a sixteen-hour shift. I have looked at rosters differently ever since: a roster is a set of decisions about people's bodies and households, written in the language of hours.

I grew up in Maitland, where several of my friends' parents worked at the stations or in the mines, and I studied employment relations at Westerfold University because it seemed the most useful thing to understand about the town. Haverell was a state-owned corporation then, with about 1,450 employees, a strong union presence and a site agreement that everyone quoted and few people had read in full. I learnt bargaining there by preparing tables and taking notes, and by sitting in crib rooms listening to why a clause mattered to the people it covered.

In 2003 I joined Brigstock Pipelines, a family-owned contractor building gas transmission pipelines across Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia. I negotiated project agreements for crews of up to 1,200 people and spent much of my time on the right of way. Pipelines cross farms, and the first person a landholder meets is usually a junior liaison officer carrying a gate key and a biosecurity checklist. On one project in western Queensland a grazier parked a tractor across the easement and spent an hour telling a 23-year-old liaison officer, in detail, what he thought of her, the company and the project. She resigned a fortnight later. Nobody at Brigstock, including me, had thought of that hour as a workplace hazard. It took me another fifteen years to say plainly that it was one.

I returned to Haverell in 2008 as manager of employee relations and became its human resources manager in 2010. I completed a part-time graduate certificate in work health and safety at Kittering Institute of Technology in 2012, studying in the evenings because I wanted to understand fatigue and psychological harm as hazards rather than as welfare topics. In 2013 the state sold Haverell's stations to a private generator. My job for the year was the transfer of 1,380 employees: their entitlements, their service, their agreement and their questions, of which the most common was whether the new owner would close the stations. I could not answer that, and I learnt not to pretend I could. People judge an employer during a change of ownership by dates and entitlements, not by reassurance.

The new owner centralised its human resources function, and in April 2014 I moved to Perth to join Tessaline Energy as human resources manager for its offshore operations, about 780 employees on two platforms in Commonwealth waters off Western Australia. Offshore work taught me how much of an employment relationship is the roster. A change from fourteen days on and fourteen off to a longer swing alters childcare, marriages and sleep, and for years the company had been able to make that change during maintenance campaigns with a week's notice. In 2019, as general manager of people for operations, I proposed in bargaining that we give up that right and govern roster changes through a joint committee advised by a fatigue scientist. Our chief operating officer opposed it, and he was right about the cost. I still think it was the most useful concession I have negotiated, and the committee proved its value when the pandemic forced us to redesign every roster in 2020.

I came home to Newcastle in July 2021 to become chief people officer of Pennardine, a contractor about to take on the largest transmission construction programme in its history. Our workforce has grown from 2,700 to 4,900 people. Much of my work since has been deciding where those people come from and on what terms: from a closing coal-fired station, from apprenticeships we fund ourselves, from First Nations communities along our routes and, more than I would like, from labour hire.

I work best with colleagues who will put a disagreement in writing. Every workforce proposal I take to our executive carries the objections of whoever disagreed, including our project directors, who often have the stronger commercial argument. I ask for the roster before the organisation chart, for exit interviews before engagement scores and for the incident reports nobody filed. People who work with me would say I am slow to promise a programme, persistent about start dates and entitlements, and unwilling to call a psychosocial hazard a communications problem.

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