One is the environment, made all the more pressing by coal's status as public enemy number one when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions.

The second issue, and one that affects thousands of Hunter coalminers through their hip pockets, is the rise of labour hire across the NSW and Queensland coal industries: an employment model specifically designed to cut labour costs, creating a two-tier workforce where two colleagues, working side by side on the same job, for the same hours, on the same rosters set a year in advance, can end up with a 40 per cent difference in their pay packets.

Nothing new there, you could say.

IN THE NEWS:

I've been writing about this since 2015, when discontent began to trouble Hunter pits.

Soon after, in a development that would have national consequences, a young mineworker with labour hire firm Chandler Macleod, working at BHP's Mount Arthur mine, went public with his experiences.

His name is Simon Turner, who I described in 2016 as "the human face of the coal industry gone wrong".

Mr Turner and other disaffected coalminers including Stuart Bonds agitated for change, believing that the Mining and Energy Union was doing less than it could to counter the rise of labour hire.

The union has fought tooth and nail to dispel that notion, and in funding and fighting a string of court cases - including high profile battles against labour hire firm WorkPac in the name of Queensland mineworkers Paul Skene and Robert Rossato - the union has spent heavily in legal battles to counter the might of the employer lobby.

Somewhere along the line, a battle that had been largely within the coal industry began to alarm employer bodies in a range of industries - including retail, hospitality and the burgeoning "gig" economy - where casual labour was very much the norm.

Non-coal employers grew concerned about the so-called "double-dipping" implications of the Skene and Rossato decisions, which they claimed would flow through to their sectors.

The Australian Industry Group, one of the country's most prominent employer representatives, said repeatedly that the Federal Court decisions, if left to stand, would cost businesses as much as $39 billion in payments the AIG said had already been covered by the 25 per cent "loading" that casual workers supposedly earned on top of the permanent hourly rate.

This 25 per cent loading was supposedly the cash equivalent of annual leave, sick leave and so on, which casual workers did not receive.

If this money is actually paid, then the AIG has a strong point.

Various law firms back this view in their online commentaries.

As one said this week, the Full Federal Court May 2020 decision "left a lot of uncertainty in its wake".

Some on the workers' side of the fence saw no uncertainty.

A week after the December decision, a University of Melbourne law school professor, Joo-Cheong Tham, wrote in The Conversation that the Federal Court's reasons for finding against WorkPac were "laid out in terms so clear it is hard to see where uncertainty arises".

All along, the industrial relations minister of the day, Christian Porter, was pushing a major industrial relations bill.

In the end, the government dropped everything except a definition of "casual employee" added to the Fair Work Act.

One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts, who had spent two years supporting Simon Turner and his fellow dissidents, voted with the government.

As he tried to work out what happened, Stuart Bonds found himself dumped without warning as One Nation's Hunter candidate.

In an editorial this week, the Australian Financial Review thanked the High Court for "restoring the concept of contract law" and for having "disposed of one of the greatest union scams attempted in Australia", as it described the double dipping issue.

But unless I've been living in a parallel universe, the double-dipping controversy was never central to the bottom-up worker opposition to the way casual work operated in the coal industry.

There was anger because even if casual mineworkers were getting a 25 per cent bonus, they were still tens of thousands of dollars a year worse off than their directly employed colleagues.

If labour hire wasn't cheaper than directly hiring a workforce, the coal companies wouldn't use it.

Remember, the labour hire firms are making their profits, too, charging much more than they paying their casuals.

In the real world, it's impossible for labour hire workers to earn anything like the permanent rate, yet the business world wants to accuse casuals and unions of wage theft!

Two final things to ponder.

Coal prices are through the roof at the moment.

Big profits will follow.

And the other issue that doesn't seem to catch on: tender records show the Commonwealth spending $3 billion in two years on labour hire, making it the country's biggest employer of casuals, with claims that thousands of such workers are not included in public service hiring caps.

Meanwhile, the two-tier workforce continues.

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