Qantas is getting rid of its remaining 2000 ground staff at Australian airports, handing responsibility for these services to operators including the huge Swiss company, Swissport.
Should we be worried by the fact that Swissport is owned by HNA, a formerly aggressive private Chinese company now controlled by state-owned banks and governments after it ran out of money and started selling assets?
One of the assets HNA couldn’t sell was a 19.9% stake in Virgin Australia, which collapsed earlier this year, wiping out HNA’s shareholding and those of other carriers such as Singapore Airlines.
Swissport is the world’s largest ground operations company. In November 2017 it bought Australian company Aerocare, at the time the main ground operator at Australian airports.
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The federal government (then led by Malcolm Turnbull) and its Foreign Investment Review Board approved the deal — even though Swissport was owned by HNA. Of course, back then tensions with China were not as nasty as they are now.
HNA paid US$2.8 billion for Swissport in 2015. The Chinese government-owned China Daily gushed about the deal at the time, confirming the support of the Chinese government.
Then chairman of Swissport Thomas Staehelin predicted a bright future for the company: “The ground service provider will continue to further strengthen its service offerings as well as global network under HNA’s ownership.”
But it hasn’t all gone to plan. In March this year, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chinese provincial government in Hainan took control of HNA because the government had run out of money.
A couple of months later Reuters reported that hedge funds and other Western investors had been buying up Swissport’s debt to try to force HNA to sell the company to them on the cheap.
Normally this would seem to be an arm’s-length transaction, but given the recent actions of the Chinese government in directing privately owned Chinese companies in steel, alcohol, retailing, beer making and education to boycott Australia, or to actively undermine Australia’s commercial interests, can we be sure HNA will resist any hare-brained idea from the central government aimed at embarrassing Australia?
As we have seen in recent days and weeks, no one can reasonably assert that Chinese private companies do not respond to central government pressure or direction.
NOTE: This story has been updated to reflect that Swissport is one of a number of operators now handling Qantas’ ground operations. The full list of companies was not included in its original statement on the outsourcing.
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Do not approve the Swissport Deal. What on earth is Qantas thinking of. Surely the employment of Australians should take precedence over a largely foreign owned company spreading its tentacles. The outcome can only be disastrous for us. I thought we had more brains than that. Negotiate appropriately with the Unions to meet the present day needs of the economy and cut out the endless tentacles of possible foreign interference of foreign investors from certain parts of the world.
When was the last time the rotten Irish dwarf running Qantas gave 2 hoots about the Australian workforce?
According to Kaine from the TWU, Qantas has received $800m in Jobkeeper payments (yet chopped staff in big numbers in August), are ‘forecasting’ they’ll be breaking even by Xmas, and still paid fat bonuses at the top end.
The fact Swissport is Chinese owned is a red herring.
I agree. I don’t understand why quanta is announcing outsourcing of ground staff, as it had already outsourced baggage handler jobs which were ineligible for jobkeeper as their employer was foreign owned. Surely the govt can have a stern word with the Irish mongrel to stop this.
Ahhhh, that lovely ‘Spirit of Australia’.
Maybe that free trade agreement will come in handy after all. I wonder whether Qantas had a slave labor sourcing policy in the tender process or terms in the contract to select and applying to the new outsourcers.
Apparently they’re going to save 100 million a year which is quite alot of money for a human heavy process, alot of which is done overseas. You can just save that in better software and fewer working conditions.
Great if you want to expand your international spy network.
Perhaps Australia needs to look more at outsourcing arrangements in part of critical infrastructure as part of its foreign investments review policy.
Staggering the Libs talk about jobs and growth while giving millions directly to business’s to outoutsource work to an overseas company who can now just import the staff they need from their own country. Thanks free trade idiots !!!!
That $100M annual savings can’t be credible, can it? Given that is just the savings, you’d reasonably calculate that Qantas has just pulled $400-$500M out of the Australian jobs market.
What have we heard from the government on this? Crickets chirping!
And the design of JobKeeper was straight out of neoliberal fantasies, a government with an excuse to hand out money to business, no questions asked, no conditions appended.
Really? And Crikey is worried about this? Just stirring the pot like the LNP and its public relations department, Murdoch’s Empire.