FIFO Miner Wins $30K After Being Unfairly Fired Over Dumped Gold
So, here’s a pretty wild workplace story from Western Australia that’s been making headlines — and it's sparking a lot of conversation around fairness in the mining industry.
A FIFO (fly-in-fly-out) worker named Jamie-Lee Corless-Crane has just won over $30,000 in compensation after she was unfairly dismissed from her job. What happened? Well, during one of her night shifts at the Mt Ida mine site, she accidentally dumped about 54 ounces of gold — worth around $200,000 — thinking it was waste rock. That’s a massive error in mining terms, but here's where things get complicated.
Jamie-Lee was working as a pit technician for Aurenne Management Services. On the night of January 7th, she was reportedly given incorrect information about the site she was working on. The lighting was poor, the excavator's GPS wasn’t working, and to top it off, she was using an outdated map. The only guidance she had was from another worker who believed the area still contained ore. But it turned out the gold had already been mined earlier that day — and she unknowingly dumped what was left, thinking it was just rock.
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About a week later, Jamie-Lee was told she hadn’t shown “due diligence” and was blamed for the loss. She tried to explain that she had relied on the handover documents from the day shift — which were wrong — and that there was no supervisor present to guide her. Despite this, she was fired on January 22nd.
Well, she took her case to the Fair Work Commission, and they saw things very differently. The Commission said the dismissal was harsh, unjust, and unreasonable . In fact, it was found that she was the least experienced member of the team , and more senior workers had missed the mistake during daylight hours. The person who was actually responsible? They only got a written warning. Others weren’t even disciplined.
The Commission noted that Jamie-Lee had been handed bad information and was set up to fail. As a result, she was awarded 16 weeks’ pay — roughly $30,769 based on her $100K annual salary. Interestingly, before entering mining, Jamie-Lee worked as a DJ and a hairdresser — so she was still relatively new to the industry.
This case really highlights the importance of proper training, communication, and support — especially in high-stakes jobs like mining. And more importantly, it shows that when systems fail, it's not always fair to put the blame on the person at the bottom of the chain.
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