FIFO is more than a roster: the bargain between remote workers, their families and employers

Fly-in fly-out work is usually described in numbers.

Two weeks on, one week off.

Eight days on, six days off.

Fourteen days at a remote mine, construction project or energy operation, followed by a flight home and a precious period with family before doing it all again.

The financial calculation can be attractive.

But FIFO is not simply a method of transporting labour to places where people do not want — or cannot reasonably be expected — to live permanently.

It is a lifestyle system.

And behind every worker boarding an aircraft for another rotation may be a household reorganising itself around that absence.

For businesses, FIFO provides access to skilled labour for operations that might otherwise struggle to recruit and retain workers.

For employees, it can provide substantial incomes, concentrated periods away from conventional workplaces and extended blocks of time off.

That exchange can work extremely well.

It can also impose considerable costs on both sides.

The successful FIFO relationship is therefore better understood as a form of symbiosis.

The worker needs the business.

The business needs the worker.

And both have responsibilities if the arrangement is to remain sustainable.

Why FIFO exists

Australia almost invites the FIFO model through geography.

Mining, resources, energy and major construction projects are frequently located enormous distances from the population centres where much of the skilled workforce lives.

Building permanent towns around every project is neither practical nor necessarily desirable.

Some resources have finite operating lives. Construction projects eventually finish. Workers may have partners with careers elsewhere, children established in schools and homes hundreds or thousands of kilometres from the worksite.

FIFO solves that geographical mismatch.

The employer brings the worker to the job rather than requiring the worker's family to relocate to it.

That simple idea has become a significant component of the Australian resources economy.

But the aeroplane only solves the geographical problem.

It does not eliminate the human one.

Two lives in one month

A FIFO worker can effectively inhabit two different worlds.

At work, life may be highly structured.

Wake at a prescribed time. Eat in a camp dining facility. Travel to site. Work a long shift. Return to accommodation. Eat. Sleep.

Repeat.

There may be little distinction between Monday and Saturday because the roster, rather than the conventional working week, determines life.

Then the worker flies home.

Suddenly the environment changes completely.

There are children to see, partners to reconnect with, household decisions to make, friends and extended family to visit, appointments to attend and ordinary domestic tasks that accumulated during the worker's absence.

The temptation is to regard those days as a holiday.

They often are not.

They are compressed normal life.

And just as the worker begins settling back into the household, departure day approaches again.

The family does FIFO too

One of the most important realities of FIFO employment is that the person receiving the FIFO wage is not necessarily the only person living the FIFO lifestyle.

Consider a household with children.

During the worker's absence, the partner at home may effectively become the sole parent.

School runs continue.

Children become sick.

Cars break down.

Bills arrive.

Sporting commitments continue.

Decisions still have to be made.

The household cannot suspend itself until the next flight arrives.

That requires independence from the person at home.

But then comes another adjustment.

The FIFO worker returns.

Someone who has spent two weeks operating independently within a highly structured workplace re-enters a household that has developed its own rhythm without them.

The returning worker may reasonably expect to resume their place in family life.

The partner who has managed everything alone may reasonably expect some relief.

Both expectations are understandable.

They are not automatically compatible.

Coming home can itself require adjustment

This is one of the paradoxes of FIFO.

Workers may spend their entire rotation looking forward to getting home, only to discover that returning home involves another transition.

A worker finishing long shifts may arrive exhausted.

The family may have been counting down the hours until that worker returned.

One side wants recovery.

The other wants engagement.

Neither is necessarily wrong.

Successful FIFO households therefore often need something more sophisticated than simply dividing a calendar into "work" and "home".

They need to manage transitions.

That may mean recognising that the first day home is different from the fourth.

It may mean deliberately protecting time for a partner.

It may mean maintaining regular contact with children while away rather than attempting to rebuild the relationship during each break.

It may mean accepting that the person who remained at home developed routines and made decisions without consulting someone thousands of kilometres away.

FIFO requires deliberate relationships.

Distance removes much of the casual contact upon which ordinary family life relies.

The money matters

There is an obvious reason workers accept these disruptions.

FIFO can pay well.

Higher remuneration can compensate for remote locations, long shifts, specialised skills, difficult conditions and extended separation from home.

For some households, the arrangement can accelerate mortgage repayment, build savings, finance investments or provide a standard of living that would be difficult to achieve through comparable work closer to home.

That creates another responsibility.

A high FIFO income can easily become a high FIFO expenditure.

A household that expands its financial commitments to consume the entire higher salary may eventually become dependent upon the roster.

The worker who once chose FIFO because the compensation justified the inconvenience may discover years later that the mortgage, vehicles and other commitments require the FIFO income to continue.

The golden handcuffs are not necessarily created by the employer.

Sometimes households manufacture them themselves.

That makes financial planning an important but underappreciated part of FIFO sustainability.

The question is not merely:

How much can we afford while this income continues?

It is:

What financial position can this unusually demanding work help us build so that one day we have greater choice?

Then there is the employer

Businesses can make the same mistake from the opposite direction.

An employee accepts a FIFO contract.

The employer pays the agreed wage.

Accommodation is supplied.

Flights are organised.

Therefore, the argument might go, the employer has fulfilled its obligations.

Legally, employment responsibilities are considerably more extensive than that.

Australian work health and safety frameworks require employers and other persons conducting a business or undertaking to manage risks to workers' health and safety so far as reasonably practicable. Safe Work Australia specifically recognises remote or isolated work as a risk factor requiring consideration, including access to assistance and communication.

But there is also a business case extending beyond minimum legal compliance.

A FIFO workforce is expensive to recruit, transport, accommodate and replace.

Retention matters.

Fatigue matters.

Morale matters.

Mental wellbeing matters.

The quality of accommodation matters.

Food matters.

Internet and communications matter.

Rosters matter.

The ability of workers to maintain some connection with their families matters.

These can easily be characterised as employee benefits.

They are also operational considerations.

Fatigue is not a private problem

Long shifts and repeated rotations create an obvious issue for businesses.

Fatigue can affect concentration, reaction time, judgement and decision-making.

In an office, a fatigued worker may make a spreadsheet error.

At a mine, heavy industrial site or remote construction operation, the consequences can be considerably greater.

This makes roster design more than an industrial-relations question.

It is part of risk management.

So are travel arrangements.

The worker's journey does not psychologically begin at the mine gate and end there. A person completing a demanding rotation may still face flights, airport transfers and potentially a long drive home.

Businesses cannot control every aspect of an employee's private life.

But a sophisticated FIFO employer understands that human performance cannot be separated neatly into "company time" and "personal time".

The same person moves between both.

Camp life matters

It is easy for management sitting in a capital-city office to regard FIFO accommodation as logistics.

A room has been provided.

A bed exists.

Meals are available.

Box ticked.

For the worker, however, that room may be home for half their life.

Small improvements can therefore have disproportionate importance.

Good food, reliable internet, privacy, clean facilities, exercise opportunities, appropriate recreation and somewhere quiet to sleep are not trivial considerations when a person spends hundreds of nights a year away from home.

Nor is workplace culture.

A well-run camp can create camaraderie.

A poorly managed one can amplify isolation.

Technology has changed FIFO

The smartphone has altered the experience enormously.

A worker thousands of kilometres from home can see children before bedtime, talk to a partner, participate in family decisions and remain part of everyday household life.

That is an extraordinary improvement over earlier generations of remote workers.

But connection is not the same as presence.

A video call cannot take a child to football training.

It cannot attend a school concert.

It cannot give an exhausted partner a night off.

Technology reduces distance.

It does not abolish absence.

Recognising that distinction helps both workers and employers avoid pretending that communications technology has solved the social consequences of FIFO.

The employer-worker bargain

At its best, FIFO represents an unusually clear commercial bargain.

The worker says:

I will give you significant blocks of my life, travel to a remote location, work demanding shifts and accept prolonged separation from my home.

The employer says:

In return, we will compensate you appropriately, transport and accommodate you safely, design reasonable working arrangements and recognise that maintaining this workforce requires more than processing payroll.

Neither side is doing the other a favour.

Both receive something valuable.

That is precisely why both acquire responsibilities.

The employee has obligations to turn up fit for work, perform professionally, manage fatigue appropriately, comply with safety requirements and avoid allowing the attractions of a high income to undermine the sustainability of the arrangement.

The employer has responsibilities for safety, appropriate working conditions, fatigue risk, accommodation and a workplace culture that treats employees as human beings rather than interchangeable units of remote labour.

And somewhere outside that employment contract sits a third participant.

The family.

It receives some of the financial benefits.

It can also carry a substantial portion of the cost.

Businesses should recognise the family equation

Employers cannot assume responsibility for employees' marriages or family lives.

Nor should they.

But businesses that depend upon FIFO labour have a commercial interest in understanding the pressures surrounding it.

Predictable rosters help families plan.

Reliable flights matter.

Last-minute roster changes have consequences beyond the employee.

Access to communications matters.

Appropriate leave policies matter.

Support following difficult events matters.

Roster design itself matters.

The employer does not need to enter the employee's home to recognise that what happens there can ultimately affect retention, attendance, wellbeing and workplace performance.

That is not corporate paternalism.

It is workforce management.

And workers have responsibilities too

Symbiosis runs in both directions.

A business cannot make a FIFO lifestyle sustainable on behalf of an employee.

Workers need to manage their money.

They need to manage sleep and recovery.

They need to communicate with their families.

They need to recognise when the arrangement is no longer working.

And they need to resist one particularly dangerous assumption:

that because they have successfully completed the last 50 rotations, they can necessarily continue indefinitely.

People change.

Children grow.

Relationships change.

Health changes.

Financial circumstances change.

A roster that worked perfectly at 27 may be considerably less attractive at 42.

The sensible question is not whether FIFO is good or bad.

It is whether it continues to work for the particular worker, family and employer.

A business model built upon human cooperation

FIFO is sometimes portrayed as a harsh consequence of the resources industry.

At other times it is romanticised as a route to exceptional earnings.

It can be both less dramatic and more interesting than either description.

FIFO is a solution to an Australian geographical problem.

Resources and projects exist where the workers often do not.

The industry moves people between the two.

But underneath the aircraft schedules, camps, rosters and payroll systems is a continuing exchange between businesses and human beings.

Businesses gain access to labour.

Workers gain access to opportunities and incomes that geography might otherwise deny them.

Families can gain financially while simultaneously accepting periods of separation.

For the system to endure, each participant has to recognise the others.

The Business Times View

FIFO should not be judged simply by the size of the pay packet or the number of days written on a roster.

Its real measure is sustainability.

Can the worker continue performing safely and effectively?

Can the family absorb repeated absence without the arrangement consuming family life?

Can the business retain skilled people without treating turnover, fatigue and disconnection as unavoidable costs of operating remotely?

When those interests are balanced, FIFO can be remarkably effective.

The worker does not merely sell labour.

The employer does not merely purchase hours.

Each accommodates the other's circumstances so that economic activity can occur in places where a conventional workforce may be impossible.

That is the symbiosis.

And like every symbiotic relationship, it survives only while both sides continue receiving sufficient benefit — and accepting sufficient responsibility — to make the relationship worth maintaining.