A last minute cancellation of this afternoon’s licensed engineer strikes at Qantas has avoided further passenger dislocations in the four-month war of words between the airline and its major unions.
The airline had prepared the way for a confrontation with full page “We’re Sorry” ads in this morning’s papers for those regular travellers who still get their news that way.
This is a strange set of industrial disputes for a number of reasons. Qantas has put a lot of hard work into ensuring that its passengers are well informed of the flight delays and cancellations it has seen fit to make in advance, thus minimising the inconvenience to frequent flyers whose brand loyalty keeps its domestic operations highly profitable.
However it isn’t drawing attention to this in its public campaign, preferring to emphasise the negatives of union actions it sees as obstructing its own plans to replace the brand as much as possible with Jetstar and to offshore cabin crew and pilots with fly in/ fly out arrangements to bypass Australian labor and superannuation obligations as much as possible.
The result this morning on live television reports from various Qantas terminals has been yet another charade in which reporters find themselves repeating the management lines about chaos in the air in front of what are perfectly normally functioning airports.
There are three sets of actions underway at Qantas authorized by Fair Work Australia after the respective unions met all of the tests of negotiating in good faith with management in seeking timely negotiated enterprise bargaining outcomes.
There are the Qantas long haul pilots, who have limited their actions to wearing atrocious red ties (made in China) and making in flight announcements in support of the truth in advertising notion that all Qantas flights should be flown by Qantas pilots trained to Qantas standards.
There are the ground staff, mainly baggage handlers, who have held the odd stop work meeting and will do so again this Thursday, maybe.
And there are the licensed engineers, who in terms of network punctuality, perform crucial operational maintenance, and whose role was to have been taken by management workers this afternoon.
The media seems to have forgotten that these are the same engineers who banned overtime off and on for around three months in 2008, but in particular, in May and June of that year, and broke the resolve of Qantas under previous CEO Geoff Dixon, when the airline gave in to their previous set of pay claims, which on expiry, have given rise to the current dispute.
That licensed engineers dispute did seriously dislocate domestic and international Qantas passengers.
Aware of the safety risks involved in deferred line maintenance of the type that the licensed engineers had been performing during compulsory overtime, Qantas meticulously reviewed the engineering status of each flight during that prolonged dispute to avoid sending off jets that might be carrying both a permitted defect in engine thrust reversers and a permitted defect in a wheel brake, which if present on the same jet, might have combined during a wet landing or other abnormal situation to cause a disaster.
As a result, the airline kept hundreds of thousands of passengers in a state of chaos for many weeks on end. Three years ago, and already forgotten.
Unless someone blinks these disputes will inevitably be resolved by compulsory arbitration, which means that the claims being made for job security by the license engineers and pilots will be dismissed as outside the court’s jurisdiction, while the pay rise and productivity components will be applied in part or full.
ABC TV reports this morning also claimed incorrectly that Qantas was in dispute with customs and immigration officials at international terminals. This is nonsense. That dispute is between a public service association and a Federal department, and affects all airlines.
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Nice work, Ben.
Are any of those rottweilers which performed so very well on camera for Patrick’s and Peter Reith a few years back still available? A certain airline’s current chief executive is displaying a similar mindset to that which was evident on the wharves.
You’d think that in the 21st century we’d have developed a system to settle industrial disputes based on the merits of the case and to fairly set wages that didn’t rely on industrial muscle.
@SBH:
We have. Unfortunately, the dog-owners don’t like the rules of polite negotiation. Maybe the CEO should be sent back wherever he came from, because he seems to be a one-man roadblock. AFAIK, the employees have several times offered polite discussion, only to be impolitely rebuffed.
This bloke has previous form, remember? Do you really want Aussies who seek to work on an Australian airline, within Australia, being forced to move their principal place of residence to NZ and accept NZ pay and conditions? That’s the kind of union-busting thug that Qantas’s little sister airline has become.
If it looks like a bully, acts like a bully, talks like a bully, what is it?
It seems that Alan Joyce doesn’t understand Australians in the way that the 3 amigos didn’t understand Australians and will do to the Qantas brand what those three did to that other trusted brand Telstra which has limped along ever since their tenure. If the board had any sense they would know that the current approach is trashing the brand – and it isn’t the unions at fault but their CEO who seems to want a stoush. They need a new CEO who can manage the business rather than destroy what has taken years to build.
Agree with all points made by Tom Jones and John Bennetts.
When Joyce finally quits these shores with a shipping container full of cash I wonder if he’ll ever reflect on whether it was worth ruining a good airline previously the pride of a nation.