Natural Attrition: The Preferred Option?

Abstract

Within official and academic discourse natural attrition has been taken as the preferred way of dealing with redundancies, in part because it appears as equivalent to normal labour turnover and hence as a natural and normal process. The paper seeks to cast some doubt on this assumption by presenting a case study of natural attrition in a central Queensland open cut coal mine in 1983. It suggests that natural attrition was more complex than the running down of the workforce through normal labour turnover and that it was not necessarily the best redundancy practice in that situation. It appears that although the use of natural attrition was advantageous for the company in allowing it to produce a 'trim ship' without upsetting the hegemonic regime it had established with the workforce, it was not ad vantageous for either the members of the workforce or for the supervisory staff in immediate contact with them.