Rio Tinto Iron Ore is making moves to upgrade and standardise facilities across its sites in the WA Pilbara region.

It is keen to provide improved communications and entertainment services to keep its workers happy.

In the midst of the skills shortage during the past boom, miners threw a lot of resources at improving their workers’ accommodation. The old donga just was not good enough anymore.

During the boom a disgruntled worker could just as easily go to another site with better accommodation and find work.

While the boom is but a fading memory, miners are finding themselves in a similar situation.

The downturn led to a lot of people leaving the industry – voluntarily or not – and many have moved on. With mining starting to ramp up again, miners are finding it harder to get the sort of people they need, which is why they want better entertainment and communications in their accommodation facilities.

Swift CEO Xavier Kris said miners were not quite facing a skills shortage but said they were keen to keep their workers happy.

The communications side of things is particularly important, with many workers on fly-in, fly-out work trying to maintain contact with loved ones at home.

Kris said the company also had relationships with Beyond Blue and Lifeline to ensure people on site had access to services and information. 

Swift already has contracts with Rio Tinto in the Pilbara at the Jerriwah Village and at its Amrun bauxite project in northern Queensland.

The standardisation push does put Swift in a good position to pick up more work from Rio Tinto.

Swift will work directly with RTIO on the project.

The Hopes Down 1 Village has 1064 rooms and Swift will bring free-to-air TV, Pay TV, in-room telephone services and in-room Wi-Fi internet to each of them.

Under the contract Swift will refit and augment Rio’s existing TV system with fibre optic cabling.

It will also provide Rio Tinto with a new gigabit passive optical network and internet user manager solution.

Swift has been in the process of diversifying away from the resources sector into other areas.

About a year ago all of its business was tied up in mining. Over this financial year it has moved into oil and gas, aged care and hospitals.

“The technology is strong enough and flexible enough to tailor the end product and end result in many different other verticals,” Kris said.

“The natural progression has been to oil and gas. But with additional functionality we have we can go into the aged care and hospital sector.”

There is also the possibility for Swift to move into the global sphere.

Kris said the deals it was doing from a content perspective were being done on a global basis so regional licensing issues would not be a problem.

“All of our content is available to all of our clients,” Kris said.

“We have offerings such as Foxtel and Fox Sports right through to specific content for specific market verticals.”

Swift has also struck an agreement with QYOU, a 24-7 channel bringing short form content specifically targeted to millennials, which it is offering to all of its clients.

Some of that “specific” content is also having broader appeal.

“The content we got for the lifestyle villages sector is becoming more sought after in the resources sector,” Kris said.

This includes content about living healthy and being healthy and relaxation videos.

Kris said to be successful Swift had to have better content and communications services than miners would be able to get at home.

“What we’re finding is we’ve had to change the way we market the business and what we put to our clients and their guests to ensure they have systems in place and content in place over and above what their guests would get if they were at home,” he said.

“That goes for everything from internet and Wi-Fi speeds to the content at their disposal.”