Mining Job Losses To Spread To City Offices

The job losses in the Australian mining industry has gone from a trickle to a spurt to a gush.

Thousands of workers have been laid off across the country.

Now it's not just miners on site who're likely to lose their jobs, big city head offices are also being culled.

The job losses started around the middle of last year when commodity prices nosedived, and they just kept on coming.

Then three weeks before Christmas the worlds third largest miner, Rio Tinto, announced plans to shed 14,000 workers.

And although the company has gone public with cuts of mainly contract workers, it's remaining tight lipped about head office job losses.

The ABC's been told some 200 people will be made redundant within weeks, most of them in office jobs in Perth.

Rio Tinto wont confirm or deny the figure and plans to keep details under wraps until it posts full year results in February.

Research analyst, with Ord Minnett Peter Arden, says it's a sign the global downturn is getting rapidly worse.

Small businesses in mining towns across the nation are being squeezed as their customers disappear.

Tom Price is an iron ore town in outback Western Australia.

Hardware store owner there Greg Musgrave says the bad situation is being made worse because mining companies aren't communicating with them.