Qantas passengers 'expect delays'

[Will T]

Qantas prepares to smash strike
Andrew West and Scott Rochfort
May 15, 2008


AUSTRALIA'S flagship airline is preparing to smash its unionised engineering workforce with non-union labour recruited in Asia and the Pacific, in a move that echoes the epic maritime dispute that rocked the waterfront a decade ago.

Documents seen by the Herald show Qantas has engaged a labour hire company, Newport Aviation, to recruit the highly trained licensed aircraft maintenance engineers.

Newport's employment contract offers "fixed-term casual" positions of between one and three months, paying $2308 a week, with the possibility of a $40,000 "completion bonus".

The Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association, which represents the 1500 Qantas workers, believes the airline is readying a casual workforce to break a strike beginning tomorrow.

The association and the airline are stalled in pay negotiations and the association's national secretary, Steve Purvinas, believes management will try to lock out workers during a four-hour stop-work meeting scheduled for tomorrow morning.

"This is shaping up as the biggest dispute since the waterfront," Mr Purvinas said, referring to the way Patrick Stevedoring trained union-busting wharfies in the Persian Gulf port of Dubai in the '90s.

The airline is understood to have assembled a strike-breaking force of up to 100 maintenance engineers, including qualified personnel who are in management.

Last night, Qantas's chief executive, Geoff Dixon, told the Herald: "We have made a decision."

He refused to comment on whether the airline was training strike-breakers, adding only: "They are our business, our contingencies. They're not for the media or anyone else [to know]."

An airline spokeswoman would neither confirm nor deny that Qantas had contracted Newport Aviation.

Union sources within Qantas and the replacement workforce say recruits were yesterday moved into hotels near airports in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane, Adelaide, Darwin and Perth and to regional air hubs in Townsville, Cairns and Alice Springs.

Recruits trained in Malaysia were also understood to be boarding planes last night, ready to start work tomorrow. "We have been hearing from our people inside management and the union-busting workforce that Qantas has today been moving people around the country to allow them to exercise this option," Mr Purvinas said.

The Herald understands that yesterday some of the recruits from Malaysia were offered an additional $40,000 to overcome their concerns about working in Australia.


The union has been pursuing a 5 per cent wage increase for the past 18 months but the airline wants to cap pay rises for non-executive staff at 3 per cent.

While Qantas cannot legally dismiss its unionised workers - as Patrick did in April 1998 before the High Court upheld a Federal Court order to reinstate them - Mr Purvinas said the company "can lock our members out of the gate indefinitely until we accede their below-inflation wage offer".

Qantas has been taking an increasingly hard line against unionised staff. It began in 2003 when it started training cheap cabin crew in Thailand and New Zealand. A former airline union official, Maurice Alexander, has also been supplying the airline with lower paid domestic flight attendants through his labour hire company.

Newport Aviation was registered by the labour hire entrepreneur Bruce Macdonald last September, just before enterprise bargaining talks between the airline and the union broke down, fuelling suspicions in the industry that Newport was established to hire strike breakers for Qantas.

The Herald was unable to contact Mr Macdonald.

http://business.smh.com.au/qantas-pr...0514-2eat.html