Qantas fights back
QANTAS has locked out international pilots, baggage handlers and engineers, essentially bringing its operations to a halt.
It has grounded all its entire domestic and international fleets indefinitely from 5pm AEDT.
The airline announced minutes ago it was locking out all members covered by the industrial agreements currently being negotiated with the Australian Licenced Engineers Union (ALAEA), the Transport Workers Union (TWU) and the Australian and International Pilots Union (AIPA).
As I figure the Qantas board runs the airline, not the unions, then that’s fine by me.
The ALP, the gift that keeps on giving. Albanese believes Qantas should have talked to him earlier. Maybe he should have spoken to his union mates earlier. Why should Qantas put up with strikes that are costing them millions of dollars daily as the union fight to get the power back they had under Hawke.
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Some questions:
Why should the CEO be paid $7 000 000.00?
Why should the travelling public be the meat in the sandwich of a dispute between the company and iits employees?
Should QANTAS be owned by the government, as it once was, since successful airlines (Singapore, Emirates, Malaysian and Thai), are all government owned?
Why should I fly QANTAS again?
Reuters say his base salary is $2.8m and the rest is incentive based. 97% of the attendees at the AGM voted yes to the increase so maybe you should raise that question with the shareholders. Not that it matters because a unions demands for more conditions and the right to control the management of Qantas shouldn’t be based on the bosses salary.
….meat in the sandwich
I don’t know but if you ask the unions they may have an answer – they have created the uncertainty – they called the strikes. If they hadn’t called the strikes then Joyce and his board of directors wouldn’t have thought it necessary to do anything.
Why should I fly Qantas again
If you believe that Qantas should be controlled by the unions then don’t fly with them. If like me, you believe that CEOs, Board members and management run a company for their shareholders and that staff, after fair and reasonable remuneration and conditions, just do their job, then choose your carrier based on prices or better services or whatever.
Not on pre-Hawke ideology. We as a country cannot go back to the days when the unions run the game and we flew at their convenience.
I don’t think governments should be in any service industry.
I have spoken to many people about this matter and I cannot find one support of the CEO’s actions. Mainstream Australians are not happy.
I’d have to question if the people you spoke to represent mainstream Australians as we humans tend to socialize with like minded people. I imagine the bulk of people who support the union stand are unionists, some of those people who have been inconvenienced and a dash of anti capitalists.
Maybe not mainstream Australia.
I too have spoken to many people about this matter and they believe that unions shouldn’t dictate company policy.
This is what mainstream Australia is thinking –
Neilsen’s Poll (published this morning) found Qantas’s actions had 36 per cent approval and 60 per cent disapproval, much the same as Morgan and Essential.
Well Kev I can assure you I spoke to many more than the 21 Members of the QANTAS board and executive team.
To a lonely man quantifying his understanding of many people could mean five or six people, Peter, and as Kev says probably people who share the same beliefs or mix in the same circles.
The unions began the action and subsequent effect on customers of the business. Joyce stepped it up much quicker than the unions desired and got an immediate and inflammatory result. Any one who thinks that industrial action in a service industry isn’t using the customers to achieve their goals, has no understanding of the way it works on the ground. It would have been easier I guess if Mr. Joyce had flown to Bali and purchased some weed from a local Policeman…..This Government would have been there in a shot.
Mr Joyce would have gained public support if he had declined the big payrise, in the interests of his company and the nation. All he has done is damage the good name of his company, with negative impacts across Australia.
Helping yourself to a lavish pay rise, whilst at the same time planning to axe 1000 Qantas jobs, trashing the brand and stuffing tens of thousands of passengers around might go down well in Tallaght, but is not a good look in Australia.
It probably doesn’t matter, as Joyce, like all Qantas employees is expendable so far as the institutional shareholders are concerned. The difference is the size of the golden parachute.
The company is owned largely by the institutional investors –
J P Morgan Nominees Australia 514,714,244 shares 22.72%
HSBC Custody Nominees (Australia) Limited 428,322,920 shares 18.91% National Nominees Limited 413,707,968 shares 18.26%.
Citicorp Nominees Pty Limited 253,053,991 shares 11.17%
They support the Qantas board and piss in each others’ pockets in the time-honoured (but amoral) tradition of most financial institutions. The mum and dad shareholders hold a very different view if the AGM is any indication.
Read the senate Hansard (23rd August) to understand exactly what Joyce is doing – http://www.aph.gov.au/hansard/senate/dailys/ds230811.pdf
He’s getting around the Qantas Sale Act by off shoring the company. Soon Qantas will exist only as a shopfront brand behind which will operate an Asian airline. If that’s OK by Australians, well and good, but if you were a Qantas employee you’d be feeling more than a little angry.
I won’t fly Qantas simply because they have the oldest fleet age of any Australian operator (11.3yrs average – some of the B767s are over 20 yrs old). Poor decisions made by recent management around route choice and fleet purchases have done the damage. Fleet purchases were put off because of the damage that would have been done to the last CEO’s bonuses at the time. He hoodwinked the board.
Notice the absence of B777s in the Qantas fleet – exactly the aircraft needed to most efficiently work the routes north to Asia, the fastest growing sector in the market. When I fly to Asia I use Malaysia and SIA. They have near-new B777s on this route.
“I don’t think governments should be in any service industry.”
Interesting principle, Kev. Would you apply it to hospitals, schools? Police…..
Why not go the whole hog and privatise the army – let 7RAR out to tender? I doubt the diggers would be happy. They’d understand exactly how the members of those “bloody unions” employed by Qantas feel about now.
On Friday 4 November a Senate inquiry begins into two proposed bills which contain provisions that would frustrate the Qantas off shoring strategies. They’d also prevent the rotation of Asia based labour in pilots and flight attendants through domestic operations. This is probably the only hope left in keeping Qantas Australian. Wilmot Hudson Fysh KBE DFC is spinning in his grave.
“Soon Qantas will exist only as a shopfront brand…”
Why is it not surprising 17 bobby red-herring hasn’t a clue about QANTAS, but still shills away with an ignorant rant?
Why is it not surprising that PeterW goes straight to ad hominem? Could it be that he has nothing better to add, or maybe it’s just another example of pure stimulus/response behaviour?
Father Jack lives…..
Joyce’s pay all up is $5M.
The union caused this.
If the staff don’t like the wage of the CEO they should aspire to be CEO or buy shares.
Notice how 17 bobby red-herring, aircraft-purchasing consultant, airline-route expert, airframe ageist, racist “Asian” air-crew loather has conflated QANTAS with 7 RAR… No mention of Vietnam yet, but the thread is yet young.
“When I fly to Asia I use Malaysia and SIA…” Wanker.
However both airlines are good examples of what ails QANTAS. Singapore Airlines is owned by the Singaporean Government and is awash with Temasek Holdings’ Ministry of Finance cash. Malaysia Airlines, once part of a joint Malaysian and Singaporean government venture with SIA, is owned by the Malaysian Government which has bankrolled it through several unprofitable periods of operations. It’s suffered losses which if incurred by QANTAS would have turned the ‘flying kangaroo’ into road kill years ago.
But that doesn’t phase 17 bobby red-herring, aircraft-purchasing consultant, airline route-expert, airframe-ageist, racist “Asian” air-crew loather, he ignores the reality of international long-haul aviation and reckons QANTAS’ problems are all because the CEO got a pay rise. What a pillock.
Hey 17 bobby red-herring, aircraft-purchasing consultant, airline-route expert, airframe ageist, racist “Asian” air-crew loather, I didn’t see you shivering under a soggy tarpaulin in Melbourne Square on the weekend with the rest of your ‘occupy’ feral lefty mates. What happened, miss your flight?
“O wretched man, wretched not just because of what you are, but also because you do not know how wretched you are!”
Marcus Tullius Cicero
PeterW has never been able to discern abuse from debate. Still, I’m reliably able to get a response from somewhere in his lower brain – always assuming there is one….
“To know the Illuminati, you must study the reptile.”
Credo Mutwa
“…never been able to discern abuse from debate…”
Another red-herring from 17 bobby red-herring, aircraft-purchasing consultant, airline route-expert, airframe-ageist, racist “Asian” air-crew loather who, for some reason, has now announced he wants to study clever, but secret Bavarians by looking at lizards – wasn’t this a thread about QANTAS?
But, yes… It’s generous vituperation for 17 bobby red-herring because he has demonstrated for years that he cannot read and comprehend even the simplest concepts because of his filthy leftist ideology. And reasoned argument for the other inhabitants of this blog because they are able to read, comprehend and engage in informed intelligent debate.
“A degree is not an education, and the confusion on this point is perhaps the gravest weakness in [Australian] thinking about education”
1961 Rockefeller Panel Project
PeterW
Vyisdere asmani orsis arsis asderis orsis? Becos deris vonors perars.
This makes more sense than your last post and is about as relevant to the issue of Qantas.
BTW – Credo Mutwa has never been to Bavaria as far as I know. He’s African. I doubt you could tell an orsis arse from your arthritic elbow.
Oh well, that’s the paddocks slashed, gutters cleaned and firebreaks cut ready for another fire season. I have a few minutes before the valley residents’ BBQ so let’s look and see what 17 bobby red-herring has been up to whilst we’ve been tractoring.
Oooohhhh – look, a ‘tantly’ from 17 bobby red-herring.
Let’s see if it’s is any different from his usual posts… No… Nup, just unintelligible gibberish and yet another demonstration of his appalling ignorance.
He has however provided a great deal of levity this afternoon as we note that although 17 bobby red-herring’s favourite shaman Credo Mutwa may not have visited Bavaria, he claims to be descended from a “supernatural race of creatures that came from the sky” from a place he names as “inter-planetary space, the dark sky that you see with stars in it every night”.
17 Bobby Red Herring’s mate also tells us during an interview he granted to ‘Spectrum News’:
Looks to me that the other “organ in the wrong place” is between 17 Bobby red-herring alien-abductee’s ears.
How was the probing 17, touch anything off?
What do you use monkey glands for?
Was your alien tasty?
I thought Joyce responded to many of the issues raised by 1735099’s during his grilling at the Senate enquiry. I watched the whole shebang with Joyce and I believe he set the record straight in a number of areas.
These were
No cost transfers between company/routes/aircraft. Joyce proposed to the union an independent audit by one of Australia’s leading accounting firms on the condition that if it confirmed what Joyce was saying then the union would agree not to raise this matter. At the time of the hearing the union had not responded.
As regards capital purchases similar amounts will be spent this year and next year – on memory about 1.5 to 1.7 $Bn. As regards the type of aircraft, he mentioned that the planes mentioned by 1735099 were not suited to Qantas and that another type, whose name escapes me,is more fuel efficient and leapfrogs the technology of the current planes.
Maybe I should have looked up the transcript before I put pen to paper so to speak so that I could refresh my memory.
It was quite clear to me that this ‘enquiry’ was nothing more than a witchhunt and Brown and Cameron should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves in the manner that they had a preconceived view of Joyce and his actions and could not deviate from it. Cameron in particular talked about the lack of time and that he had so many questions, but continually harped on the one point over and over again.
Joyce 1
Senate -2
Despite the cost to QANTAS and the brilliant performance of Joyce in the Senate we now read:
“TWU national secretary Tony Sheldon said there was “every likelihood” the union would appeal against the tribunal decision that forced an end to Qantas’s grounding of its entire fleet last month.
If a stay application went ahead, and was successful, the ban on strike action would be halted and the union’s baggage handlers and ramp and catering employees could resume industrial action against the airline.”
So the unions don’t like the umpire’s decision and can’t wait to get back to destroying their members’ employer.
Fools the lot of them.
“whose name escapes me”
They’re the Boeing 787 Cav – the “Dreamliner”. In the light of recent history their purchase was not a sound decision. See – http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/08/14/losing-track-of-boeing-787-dreamliners-failures/
QANTAS lost the plot with fleet selection by not buying the 777 – a much more efficient aircraft than the vintage 747s that constitute much of their international fleet.
Joyce has become the poster boy of the Murdoch press. I’ll reserve judgement on whether this is a win for Joyce until we see the outcome of both the Fair Work compulsory conference and the AIPA legal action.
Responding to wearing red ties and making unauthorised PA announcements by grounding the airline may appear, to someone of reasonable outlook, a tad disproportionate.
“I’ll reserve judgement…”
Oh, how very generous of you.
Peter….. “Mr Joyce would have gained public support if he had declined the big payrise, in the interests of his company and the nation.”
How can declining an increase in his wage structure be considered “in the interest of his company and the nation” when clearly the board know they can afford the increase and that increase will have no noticeable effect on “the nation” as a whole? The man must be considered, by those with control of these matters, to be doing an exceptional job as most increases are performance based these days.
If you were making $100,000 a week would you care if you won the popularity stakes. He managed to get things moving again with a little collateral damage and I’ll bet there won’t be any free flights offered as compensation left unused. Time heals all wounds and tossing in reduced cost fares and consumer bait will assist to reduce the time required.
I would argue he has done signiicant damage. For the first time this Christmas I am flying out of the country on an airline that is not Qantas.
Why, because I canot be certain that QANTAS will fly due to the unions and QANTAS manageent.
It takes 2 to fight and 2 to stop the fight.
“the board know they can afford the increase”
Funny that – I thought the company was owned by the shareholders.
“a little collateral damage”
Now there’s a Freudian slip…..
Yes, Bobby, the shareholders own the company, very good. The company has put in place people of repute to make business decisions on its behalf which includes the wages of employees, that’s an uneducated guess on my behalf. The decision was to increase Joyces salary, that’s fact.
I used collateral damage as a term familiar to people who have military experience, I forgot about you. Feel free to attempt to analyse my psyche from my scribblings.
With you in mind I should have rambled on about sacrifice for the good of the people/Red Army/Communism, and finished with but I vote for the Green Browns and return to Vietnam three times a year in an attempt to assuage the hurt I may have inflicted by serving my country in a conflict I honestly did not believe in.