The Maritime Union of Australia has described BlueScope Steel's decision to sell its cargo ship the Iron Monarch as a kick in the guts.

BlueScope announced this week that it would be selling the 38 year old ship, which carries slab steel to the company's Western Port in Victoria. In 2011, the Iron Monarch received AUD 17 million upgrade.

As part of the company's restructure, it has stopped producing slab steel and modifying the Iron Monarch to carry hot rolled coil steel is considered too expensive.

The union's Illawarra spokesman Mr Garry Keane said that it is likely 60 workers at Port Kembla will lose their jobs as a result. He added that "Coming on the back of BlueScope just having spent AUD 17 million doing a refurbishment of the Iron Monarch, which left our guys thinking they were fairly secure in their positions for the next 10 years, it's really quite devastating for the people."

Mr Colin Johnston has been working on the Iron Monarch for 16 years and says the announcement came as a shock to the ship's crew and stevedores. He says the weekly, round trip aboard the Iron Monarch meant the workers could see their family more than most shipping jobs.

He added that "There's one of the blokes that has been on here since the ship first came out and a lot of the crew that have come through have spent a lot of years on board this vessel because of the actual privileges of being able to get home and seeing your family and being a home porter. Well I'm still in shock over it and I can't believe that after they'd just done the major dry-docking and life extension on this vessel to turn around and cease with slab and not to convert this ship to carry coil, it's got a massive impact on me and the crew on the vessel and also our family."

BlueScope's supply chain general manager Mr Ingilby Dickson says switching to rail is more cost effective than modifying the ship. He added that "They did have a look at whether they could do a capital restructure and significantly change the structure of the Iron Monarch to make it available to carry big round things hot rolled coil and unfortunately the commercial [considerations] with an old vessel like the Iron Monarch didn't stack up for a medium to long term solution compared to rail."

Mr Dickson says the Iron Monarch will be sold. He added that "That could be moving steel around the Mediterranean or northern Europe or even throughout Asia, where there may be some potential opportunities for her further use. Hopefully that will be the case, obviously the last thing we'd want to see is her moving to any sort of scrapyards."

(Sourced from www.abc.net.au)