“Spartan work camps” and bad catering: Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro workers strike for more pay

Work has stopped at the troubled Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro project again, this time as Webuild employees demand higher pay packets, in line with tunnelling work elsewhere in the country.

The massive, massively overbudget, and delayed Snowy 2.0 project has been hit by a number of stop-work incidents, usually over safety issues.

This time however, the Australian Workers’ Union (AWU) has called a 24 hour strike on Wednesday, claiming the Italian company is refusing to provide pay parity with tunnellers in Melbourne.

Webuild is also doing the tunnelling for the North East Link project in Melbourne.

AWU NSW secretary Tony Callinan says the Snowy 2.0 tunnellers must live in “spartan work camps” with bad catering, while doing two weeks on, one week off fi-fo work.

“In Melbourne on the North East Link project… those members get to go home each night to their families,” he said in a statement.

“Those working on Snowy 2.0 live and work in the wilderness of the Snowy Mountains in the middle of winter.”

Callinan says the AWU has been trying to negotiate wages for the last 10 weeks, but Webuild did not engage.  

A statement from the company handling the build, Future Generation Joint Venture, said it was aware of the strike being taken as part of the Enterprise Bargaining Agreement negotiation currently underway undertaken.

“The employer has and will continue to negotiate in good faith for a replacement agreement with the relevant bargaining representatives,” the statement said.

History of problems

The $12 billion Snowy 2.0 project will add 2.2 gigawatts of electrical power, and 175 hours of storage, to the current 4.1GW Snowy hydro scheme, pumping water from the Talbingo Reservoir up to the higher Tantangara Reservoir.

The original project was pitched by then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in 2017 as a $2 billion renewable energy game changer that would be ready for action in 2021. Within months the feasibility study costings were released and the project price had doubled. 

Delays have been a problem for the first tunnelling machine on the site, Florence, which was stuck from September 2022 to December 2023 after hitting soft earth, and then again in 2024 after running into hard rock.

Late in 2024 Snowy Hydro said it would buy a fourth machine to try to meet its 2028 completion deadline, and it is due later this year.

But Snowy Hydro and the former Coalition federal government were reluctant to reveal the scale of the challenges – and the extra cost – until the full bill was laid bare before a Senate Estimates committee hearing in 2023. 

In 2024 Snowy Hydro hit reset on the project, replacing the $5.1 billion fixed-price main works contract with a cost-plus contract which doubled the bill to $12 billion.

It also adjusted the completion date to December 2028 – the sixth such change.

The project has been plagued by mishaps as well. 

One of the most recent was when shrapnel broke off a giant ventilation fan in one of the tunnels, forcing tunneling work to halt for the second time in two months.

The first stop-work of the year was due to concerns that workers hadn’t been shown how to use underground safety refuge chambers.

NSW government agency Safework has also been involved, holding regular bimonthly meetings about worker safety concerns including a crane malfunctioning.

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