Qantas Dispute

What happened
The spirit of Australia was sunk for a little under two days at the end of October. Qantas CEO Alan Joyce grounded the entire Qantas fleet in a bid to end industrial action from Qantas pilots, engineers and ground staff.

Staff were up in arms over the national carrier’s plans to refocus the business on Asia, which would cost around 1000 jobs here in Australia. Staff were also up in arms about pay and job security.

What happened next
Tens of thousands of domestic and international travellers found themselves stranded in unfamiliar cities. When The Herald-Sun asked one irate Qantas passenger who was stranded in Singapore what he’d do if he ran into Alan Joyce, he said: “I’d punch him. I wouldn’t treat a dog the way he’s treated us.”

Continue reading "Biggest moments of 2011 #18 Alan Joyce chucks a wobbly" »

What price forgiveness? Will a free plane ride make you take Qantas back into your heart? Will you once again feel a tickle of pride and fondness as the falsetto notes of ‘I Still Call Australia Home’ rise from those precocious young throats?

For most people, the answer will be: “Hell yeah, and I’ll take one of those fluffy kangaroos home for the kids!”. We can’t sustain moral outrage for long, especially in the face of compensation.

The Qantas ‘crisis’ is a numbers game from start to finish, and it’s a game they’ll probably win.

Continue reading "Qantas and Joyce will weather this specific storm" »

An industrial dispute has two sides – employer and employee. The Qantas dispute had a very important third side – the innocent travelling public. How they see the dispute, and which side they blame, will be important in the backwash.

If they blame Qantas, the airline will have problems regaining, let alone improving, its share of the market. If they blame the unions, Qantas will have a strengthened bargaining position.

Did Qantas have any alternative to the extraordinary decision to ground the fleet? It was facing continuous scattergun strikes, and the unions involved were not showing any intention to try to come to a compromise. The grounding tactic was clever, in that it forced the government to bring Fair Work Australia into the game, with the result that the guerilla strikes were ended.

Continue reading "Qantas standoff has cleared the air for real reform" »

Much of the public commentary around the Qantas dispute has been so undergraduate that you would think it had been authored by the people at Occupy Wall Street. But it is Qantas itself which invited much of the negative coverage by not thinking through its tactics last week ahead of the dramatic events of the weekend.

This dispute has at its centre a pretty simple question – does Qantas management have the right to manage Qantas? Or should Tony Sheldon from the Transport Workers Union have veto power over everything from how many staff the airline employs, when and where its aircraft hangars are built, who maintains its fleet, to whether it is allowed to expand into Asia?

I am not an aviation writer but at a guess I would say that as a former senior executive at Aer Lingus and the successfully expansionist boss of the fledgling airline Jetstar, Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce knows a bit more about running airlines than Tony Sheldon.

Continue reading "The Qantas dispute is not about Alan Joyce’s salary" »

First Alan, congratulations on your pay rise, and congratulations on Qantas’ profit in the last financial year. But sadly, I can’t congratulate you on your decision to take your bat and ball, and your aeroplanes, and go home.

Let me make this clear, you had a lot of options to resolve this dispute, but you picked the nuclear option, the one that caused the most disruption to passengers and the tourism industry.

On Saturday you chose to become the CEO that stops the nation, grounding Qantas’ fleet and stranding thousands of people from outback doctors, foreign leaders, and Spring Carnival punters.

Continue reading "If a union did this, all hell would break loose" »