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

[Nigel C]

The gloves are officially off it seems.

It looks like the engineers are going to have their works cut out for them.
On one hand they'll be fighting with management at the negotiating table, and on the other they'll be trying desperately to undermine the labour hire engineers to try to protect and justify their jobs, pay and conditions.

As unlikely as it may seem, I just hope they don't resort to any dirty tactics and compromise the safety of the flying public in order to push their agenda.

[damien b]

The ALEA has called off the strike according to the following report.

From news.com.au

Qantas engineers call off strike
By Peter Veness
May 15, 2008 01:15pm


QANTAS engineers have backed down from planned industrial action, indicating they will accept a smaller increase in their wage demand.

ACTU president Sharan Burrow has asked the Australian Licensed Engineers Association (ALEA) to call off its four-hour stop-work meeting planned for tomorrow afternoon, which Qantas had said would force it to cancel a number of domestic flights.

Ms Burrow said the engineers would be willing to accept a rise somewhere in between the 5 per cent they demanded and the 3 per cent Qantas had continued to offer over the previous 18 months of failed wage negotiations.

However it was not immediately clear if Qantas would be prepared to pay more than 3 per cent.

The union said earlier that it had not expected the strike to cause cancellations, but Qantas boss Geoff Dixon had said some flights would be cut if the stop-work had gone ahead.

Reports this morning claimed Qantas had been offering non-union workers $100,000 for six months work in a bid to break the planned strike. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that documents showed Qantas had also offered a $40,000 "completion bonus".

A Qantas spokesman would not comment on those reports. The airline stands to make a $1.5 billion profit this financial year.

ALEA federal secretary Steve Purvinas said most of the potential strike-breakers would have been expat engineers returning home from Malaysia. Mr Purvinas said they stood to earn three times more than Qantas's current engineers.

Mr Purvinas had said there were also rumours that union engineers will be locked-out of their workplace.

[Alex G]

....but the airline wants to cap pay rises for non-executive staff at 3 per cent.

Love it... five or more percent for themselves no worries, but when it comes to the workforce, oh noooo we cant have that!

[Kelvin R]

Hi Alex G,

There are a couple of books you might like to read which would (if you are interested) provide some balance into your thinking. The first is called "The World is Flat 3.0" by Thomas L. Friedman see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_is_Flat for a summary and http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/index.htm this will explain what you can do about flattism as an individual to help ensure that its not your job that is outsourced or offshored or undercut by a graduate.

The second book is called Strategy Maps by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_map for a summary and amazon or fishpond.com.au to buy the book which explains why some jobs are paid more than others and therefore why some jobs may have a payrise capped and others not.

The first book is written by a journalist and is based on observational opinion and the second by a couple of academics and is based on cold hard research. Both make good reading from an observational "why do things work they way they do and what should be changed to make them better perspective".

[Marty H]

Originally Posted by damien b

The ALEA has called off the strike according to the following report.

From news.com.au

Why Im not part of a union as they are all full of hot air and gutless.

[Alex G]

Originally Posted by Kelvin R

....the book which explains why some jobs are paid more than others and therefore why some jobs may have a payrise capped and others not.

Kelvin, not to knock the books or anything, but i'd call the attitude hypocritical.
Management saying "No, you can't have your payrise, but we'll take a bigger one, just because we can"...


I am more than well aware some jobs pay more than others, thats natural- for example i got paid about twice as much when i washed dishes than when i flew a Twin Otter; doubt the book can explain that one!!!
However when the above management hypocricy happens, its just a load of stuff that i just flushed down the toilet.....

"Flattism" hmm, can't say ive heard that one before.... too many ISMs in the world..........

I might stop being so blunt with my opinion when i get flying though.... Best way i can ensure my job goes to nobody else is to do such a good job- its ultimately not my decision to give it away to someone else. This is the management...... and back we go to my last post!

[Kelvin R]

Hi Alex,

I am not one for books either but those two are well worth the effort, especially The World is Flat 3.0. I find the concepts of globalisation and management theory very interesting as I have seen so many poor managers in my opinion that I wanted to understand what was going wrong.

The problem that the engineers have is that the majority of their jobs can be done at a similiar level of quality for less money overseas in a business which is struggling to return the value expected by shareholders and requires a fleet of around 100 planes which are around 20 years old to be replaced. QF only have a limited pot of money and management have to decide where to spend that money based on what return each option will make. To be blunt about it, giving engineers another 2% increase will not return the value that shareholders (not management) expect.

Who appoints management? The shareholders do. The shareholders have essentially lent QF money to operate the business and they expect (reasonably so) that money makes a return. If this isn't reasonable to expect an airline to make a suitable return for shareholders at the expense of highly skilled Australians then the business should not be a public company but should have remained a Government owned business run for the greater good of the nation. Sadly it seems you can't claim national interest and shareholder value at the same time.

Perhaps the Unions and the Government should buy QF back and return it to being a state run airline?

[D Chan]

Originally Posted by Kelvin R

Sadly it seems you can't claim national interest and shareholder value at the same time.

that is true unless you're talking about Singapore's Temasek Holdings.

Originally Posted by Kelvin R

Perhaps the Unions and the Government should buy QF back and return it to being a state run airline?

State-ownership model should be buried and never resurrected.
1. It doesn't make sense for the government on one hand to be the regulator (whether we're talking about regulating safety, traffic rights or other areas) AND operating an airline that is being regulated. What I am referring to is that there isn't enough 'indepedence' betwee the regulated and the regulator because both belongs to the government.

2. you can be rest assured that if an airline falls back to government ownership - it will be used as a politcal football by politicians who know very little or nothing about what it takes to run an airline (Alitalia and Air India are good examples). There are exceptions of course (e.g. Emirates), but not a lot of them. In fact if Qantas was not privatised back in the 90s I'd doubt it would be in as good a shape as it is today.

3. What would the state-owned company's competitors think?

[Ash W]

Originally Posted by Kelvin R

Hi Alex,

I am not one for books either but those two are well worth the effort, especially The World is Flat 3.0. I find the concepts of globalisation and management theory very interesting as I have seen so many poor managers in my opinion that I wanted to understand what was going wrong.

The problem that the engineers have is that the majority of their jobs can be done at a similiar level of quality for less money overseas in a business which is struggling to return the value expected by shareholders and requires a fleet of around 100 planes which are around 20 years old to be replaced. QF only have a limited pot of money and management have to decide where to spend that money based on what return each option will make. To be blunt about it, giving engineers another 2% increase will not return the value that shareholders (not management) expect.

Who appoints management? The shareholders do. The shareholders have essentially lent QF money to operate the business and they expect (reasonably so) that money makes a return. If this isn't reasonable to expect an airline to make a suitable return for shareholders at the expense of highly skilled Australians then the business should not be a public company but should have remained a Government owned business run for the greater good of the nation. Sadly it seems you can't claim national interest and shareholder value at the same time.

Perhaps the Unions and the Government should buy QF back and return it to being a state run airline?

That is a pretty good summary of how the world of business works and the situation that Qantas finds themselves in. Things are not as simple as many seem to think.