The first piece of advice women receive when they start work at mining giant Fortescue is not about safety procedures or site protocols. It is ‘don’t leave your underwear on the line, because it will be stolen’.
That detail, buried among far more disturbing allegations in a class action filed this week by law firm JGA Saddler, is the one that stops you cold. Not because it is the worst of what is alleged, it is nowhere near the worst, but because of what it reveals about the daily psychological labour demanded of women in these environments.
Before they have learned the ropes, women are inducted into a code of survival: watch your back, watch your laundry, watch yourself.
The class action, backed by UK litigation funder Aristata, is open to women who worked at Fortescue’s Australian mining hubs and accommodation camps between February 2006 and December 2025. It alleges decades of systemic sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and hostile workplace environments.
It follows similar actions filed against BHP and Rio Tinto in 2024. This is not about a series of isolated corporate failures. It is an industry-wide trend.
The allegations include women stalked into the bush when they needed to use the toilet, followed back to their rooms and subjected to constant sexual commentary. One woman returned to site after a stillbirth and was told to “get over it.” Another found a strange man in her room. A woman who asked male colleagues to blow into a breathalyser was told, “I’ll blow wherever you want me to.” Women who reported any of this were, according to the law firm, dismissed, demoted, silenced, or blacklisted from the industry.
Fortescue says it is committed to a safe and respectful workplace and has introduced duress apps, deadlocks, swipe-card access, and CCTV across accommodation villages. These are not nothing. But security cameras do not change the culture that made them necessary.
The mining industry is not an outlier in having a problem. Nationally, one in five Australian workers experienced workplace sexual harassment in the past 12 months, and one in three in the past five years. Women bear the brunt, with 41 per cent harassed in the last five years. Mining sits among the highest-prevalence industries at 40 per cent. The most recent Diversity Council Australia data found workers in high-risk environments were four times more likely to experience harassment than those in lower-risk settings.
Male-dominated industries amplify every risk factor. The power imbalance is structural and the isolation is literal. In remote camps, there is nowhere to go, no one neutral to turn to, no easy exit.
What makes the Fortescue allegations particularly damning is their reach across time. Twenty years of alleged conduct. Twenty years of women arriving at remote sites and being pulled aside by other women to learn the rules of survival. Twenty years of complaints met with dismissal and retaliation. The latest data shows only 10 per cent of employees who reported harassment saw their employer take disciplinary action against the harasser. When accountability is that rare, the message to perpetrators is unambiguous.
There is also a leadership failure embedded in this story. Women make up just a quarter of Fortescue’s workforce and not quite 29 per cent of its leadership positions. When decisions about culture, complaints, and consequences are made overwhelmingly by men, women’s reports filter upward into environments that are, at best, indifferent. More women in leadership does not automatically fix a broken culture, but it changes who designs the reporting systems and who sets the tone for what is acceptable. Representation is not a cure, it is a must.
Legislative reform is slowly catching up to what workplaces have long refused to do voluntarily. Since 2022, employers have been under a positive duty to proactively prevent sexual harassment rather than simply respond to it. Yet 40 per cent of workplace leaders remain unaware of these obligations, and only 76 per cent know that workplace sexual harassment is even illegal despite it having been illegal for four decades.
Victoria has moved further than most. From 1 July 2026, the Restricting Non-disclosure Agreements (Sexual Harassment at Work) Act 2025 takes effect, making Victoria the first jurisdiction in Australia, and among the first in the world, to restrict NDAs in workplace sexual harassment matters. The Victorian Ministerial Taskforce found NDAs were routinely misused to silence victims, protect employer reputations, and hide serial offenders. The government has also committed $5.5 million to its Safe Workplaces for Women initiative. It is the kind of structural intervention that is long overdue.
So let us not pretend we are surprised by what has been alleged at Fortescue. It is the most recent exposure of something documented, litigated, surveyed, and legislated about for years. The surprise would be if the industry had quietly fixed itself. It has not.
What is unacceptable, in 2026, is treating sexual harassment as a personnel problem rather than a structural one. It is not about a few bad men.
Women deserve workplaces where the first thing they are told is not how to protect their underwear. That is not an unreasonable ask. It is a legal obligation. It is past time we enforced it like one.