When people begin counting their coworkers, a certain silence descends upon a corporate office. Before any announcement, it takes hold through whispers and rumors in elevators. Sometime in early 2026, the silence in Rio Tinto’s St Georges Terrace offices in Perth began, and it hasn’t completely ended since.
The second-biggest mining company in the world is undergoing a “fundamental” restructuring, according to Simon Trott, the company’s new CEO. The word “fundamental” was chosen on purpose. This isn’t a cautious reaction to a challenging quarter or a trimming exercise. Up to 20% of Perth’s white-collar workforce may be let go before the next fiscal year, according to people close to the company. The math is unsettling when you take into account that Rio employs more than 25,000 people in Australia and New Zealand alone.
In August 2025, Trott assumed leadership after the board dismissed Jakob Stausholm. His first significant action was to split Rio’s four commodity divisions into three. As a result, two members of the executive committee, Australia CEO Kellie Parker and minerals chief Sinead Kaufman, quietly left the building. The layer directly below, which consists of about 90 individuals with “managing director” titles, is the focus of the second phase that is currently underway. Up to thirty of those positions might not endure. It’s a big cull at an organizational level that seldom makes the news but subtly influences decision-making.
Trott was as measured as usual when he spoke following Rio’s AGM in Perth earlier this month. “As promised,” he told shareholders, the company had already delivered the full US$650 million in savings that it had promised on its December capital markets day, “with substantially more on the way.” He refused to specify how many roles were still at risk or where those additional savings would come from. Few people in the room, however, would have required him to explain it. People are able to sense the restructuring’s current momentum.
What stands out is what Trott has decided to defend. Frontline operational roles are specifically protected from these cuts, such as the FIFO workers who fly into the Pilbara mines and those who maintain Rio’s iron ore output. The reasoning is fairly obvious: Rio isn’t going to cut off the branch it sits on, and production is the business. Rather, it seems that the company is moving decision-making power closer to mine sites and away from centralized Perth offices—a strategy that seems effective on paper but is often confusing in reality.
This is not the case at the Yarwun alumina refinery in Gladstone, Queensland. Rio is reducing production there by 40% starting in October 2026, which will result in the loss of about 180 jobs in a local community with few other options. It’s possible that Yarwun was never going to make it through the current efficiency drive unscathed because aluminum has been under cost pressure for years. Nevertheless, it is difficult to ignore the discrepancy between the clinical terminology of “portfolio optimisation” and the actual situation of Gladstone families reassessing their prospects.
Here, Rio isn’t working alone. Since Alcoa closed its Kwinana refinery in early 2024 and laid off 1,000 workers, a sort of reckoning has been building throughout Australia’s mining industry. Closures for nickel and lithium came next. Cuts to BHP’s Queensland coal division were announced. After years of hiring more people during the commodity boom, the industry is now doing the opposite—quietly, gradually, but on a large scale.
It’s unclear if Trott’s reform will result in the sharper, leaner Rio Tinto he has promised. The company’s 2025 full-year profit dropped 14% to just under US$10 billion, its worst performance in five years. This decline was mostly caused by weak iron ore prices as China‘s demand for steel declined. With projects in Arizona and Chile, as well as an aluminum company he refers to as the biggest integrated producer in the Western world, Trott consistently points to copper as the future. It’s a realistic vision. Only the next two or three years will show whether the current restructuring fosters it or merely ushers in a period of institutional disruption.
