According to the big three iron ore miners in the region, Rio Tinto, BHP and Fortescue Metals Group, they collectively employ 1683 Aboriginals.
FMG CEO Elizabeth Gaines told Australia's Mining Monthly Fortescue had a longstanding commitment to providing training, employment and business development opportunities to Aboriginal people and has about 640 Aboriginal employees working at sites across the Pilbara, representing 17.3% of its team members based at Pilbara operations.
A Rio Tinto spokesman told AMM it had 1200 indigenous employees working in iron ore across the state, and 420 in the Pilbara.
Major Pilbara player BHP has 595 Aboriginal people in the Pilbara, which represents around 8.6% of its workforce there. This includes employees and core contractors.
However, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the 2016 census, while about 8000 Aboriginal people live in the Pilbara only 907 of them work in the iron ore industry, which brings into question the validity of the miners' claims.
Under the Native Title Act (1994) companies are obliged to negotiate indigenous land-use agreements with Traditional Owners before they can start mining, and many ILUAs have employment targets that are meant to boost the socio-economic wellbeing of the Native Title holders.
Rio Tinto takes this a step further.
While the miner has always tried to position itself as a champion of indigenous issues, and one of the largest private sector employers of indigenous Australians, it does not pay mining royalties to Native Title holders on six of its Pilbara mines because they were established before the Native Title Act came into effect in 1994.
Rio Tinto has 16 mines in the Pilbara that stretch over land belonging to nine different Traditional Owner groups.
It fought with local TO groups in the late 1980s to expand its Marandoo iron ore mine, with the groups using heritage and environmental legislation to delay the expansion for two years.
A study commissioned by Rio Tinto in 2005 found that Aboriginal people had not generally benefited directly from mining, and in many ways were worse off.
According to the study, despite substantial growth in economic activity and employment opportunity in the Pilbara since the 1960s, the overall employment rate for Indigenous people rose only slightly from 38% in 1971 to just 42% in 2001.
According to Rio Tinto's own resource guide for integrating agreements into communities and social performance work it has participation agreements with seven of the TO groups.
Initial agreements were sought only in 2006, ostensibly so Rio Tinto could avoid serious Native Title and cultural heritage-related delays to its expansion and development plans at the start of the iron ore construction boom.
Rio Tinto achieved its most urgent goal of expediting its mine expansion plans in a short period of time but it took a further five years to negotiate further comprehensive participation agreements with some of the groups, which apparently stretched the patience of the relevant TO groups.
Under a typical Rio Tinto agreement about 17% of payments are distributed directly to the beneficiaries, which normally occurs twice a year in July and in December.
Around 50% of the funds go into a future fund that cannot be accessed until the life of the mine is finished, and the remainder goes toward community development programs or the funding of the responsible Aboriginal corporation.
Rio Tinto finished a five-year review of the agreements it had with indigenous groups in 2015, which was initiated to see if the company could implement the agreements in a better way.
It sent consultants to each group to ask how people felt the agreement was going but made it clear the agreements would not be opened for renegotiation.
In the Pilbara one of the biggest issues is the fact that the people who negotiate the agreement are not the people who implement the agreement, which highlights the disconnect on the ground.
The WA Parliamentary Economics and Industry Standing Committee is holding an inquiry into the implementation of economic participation obligations in Native Title agreements negotiated by resources companies in regional WA.
Native Title expert Franklin Gaffney told the committee there seemed to be an issue around the transparency and ongoing administration of ILUAs.
He said it was assumed Native Title agreements would have a significant positive impact on the socio-economic wellbeing of local traditional owners, however, the evidence showed this was not happening.
Gaffney said when these agreements were put in place the federal government was of the view that because these were normal commercial contracts, the participants go to court and seek damages or seek an order for specific performance.
However, he said, this never happened.
Gaffney said the reason it had not occurred was because if a case was brought that an agreement had not been put in place, some agreements have had ability to cut off one's going to the trust.
He said from a resource company point of view, the determination provisions were pretty good.
The committee is considering whether to call for an official inquiry or propose an alternative avenue that could help ensure the commitments negotiated were implemented and their effect on the socio-economic wellbeing of local traditional owners in regional WA was properly monitored.
Gaffney said mining companies could not solve the social and economic issues facing Indigenous people in the Pilbara and neither could government.
He said the answer lay with the three Cs of coordination, collaboration and community.
