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Episode details

World Service,26 Jan 2012,25 mins

Australia's Fly In Fly Out Workers

Assignment

Available for over a year

How would you like to be able to earn over a hundred thousand dollars a year with no qualifications? Sound impossible in these difficult economic times? Not in Western Australia, where huge demand for natural resources from places like China has lead to a boom in the mining industry. There's been a boom in high paying jobs too - many of them so-called Fly In Fly Out, or FIFO, jobs where people travel to remote mine sites for several weeks at a time. It's a lucrative way to earn a living, but there's increasing concern in Australia that it might be coming at a big cost for workers and their families. For the BBC's Assignment programme, James Fletcher has been to Western Australia to find out more.

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