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stui magpie 
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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Interesting article. You'd have to think that Qantas tactics are unlikely to get a lot of sympathy from a Labor government, but neither can they afford to come down too strongly on the side of the unions.
This could get very interesting.
http://www.theage.com.au/national/is-this-the-start-of-a-brutal-new-era-of-ir-20111029-1mpq0.html
(edit, works better when I attach the link  )
Second edit, just found this article.
| Quote: | Julia Gillard has intervened to force Qantas planes back into the air, last night making an emergency application for Fair Work Australia to order an end to all industrial action.
After the snap grounding of all planes by the company at 5pm yesterday to implement a lockout of staff taking industrial action, the Gillard government last night evoked emergency powers under Section 424 of the Fair Work Act.
It asked the industrial umpire to order planes back in the air and staff back to work ahead of compulsory arbitration at a late-night hearing in Melbourne. |
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/national/pm-steps-in-to-force-planes-back-in-the-air-20111029-1mppy.html#ixzz1cDAD7R9d
Not a bad intervention step by Gillard.
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down.
Last edited by stui magpie on Sun Oct 30, 2011 9:12 am; edited 1 time in total |
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HAL
Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.
Joined: 17 Mar 2003
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| I thought so too. |
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Proud Pies 
Joined: 22 Feb 2003
Location: Knox-ish
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Joyce was a senior manager at Ansett before it went into administration in 2001.
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Jacqui © Proud Pies 2003 and beyond |
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HAL
Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.
Joined: 17 Mar 2003
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| I hope to be as smart as HAL in 2001. |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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| Proud Pies wrote: | | Joyce was a senior manager at Ansett before it went into administration in 2001. |
Also managed Jetstar most recently. You'd reckon that's where the board was coming from when they appointed him.
Also, this bit.
| Quote: | From the day Qantas management decided to take on the unions, it became a philosophical fight about industrial relations rather than pay and conditions. And it was a fight that had been brewing since Leigh Clifford became the chairman. Clifford is renowned for his anti-union stance and played a similar tough role in breaking the unions in the mining industry when he worked for Rio Tinto.
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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Proud Pies
Joined: 22 Feb 2003
Location: Knox-ish
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| stui magpie wrote: | | Proud Pies wrote: | | Joyce was a senior manager at Ansett before it went into administration in 2001. |
Also managed Jetstar most recently. You'd reckon that's where the board was coming from when they appointed him.
Also, this bit.
| Quote: | From the day Qantas management decided to take on the unions, it became a philosophical fight about industrial relations rather than pay and conditions. And it was a fight that had been brewing since Leigh Clifford became the chairman. Clifford is renowned for his anti-union stance and played a similar tough role in breaking the unions in the mining industry when he worked for Rio Tinto.
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says it all doesn't it. Sounds like the waterfront.
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Jacqui © Proud Pies 2003 and beyond |
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Magpie Jack
Joined: 21 Jul 2007
Location: Bribie Island, on the Collingwood Coast
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I hope all the children are safe. There will be unaccompanied minors between the ages of 12 and 15 left stranded at the tranship airports waiting the second leg of their journey. It is hard to comprehend how supposedly intelligent human beings on huge salaries would put children at risk like that, one day after we had a national awareness day for Child Safety in remembrance of Daniel Morcombe. Joyce should have given a weeks notice before grounding the planes.
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Bob Rose....the measuring stick of humanity |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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| Magpie Jack wrote: | | I hope all the children are safe. There will be unaccompanied minors between the ages of 12 and 15 left stranded at the tranship airports waiting the second leg of their journey. It is hard to comprehend how supposedly intelligent human beings on huge salaries would put children at risk like that, one day after we had a national awareness day for Child Safety in remembrance of Daniel Morcombe. Joyce should have given a weeks notice before grounding the planes. |
Before we throw ALL the rocks at Joyce, how do you reckon the unions industrial campaign of rolling stoppages would have effected kids? Wouldn't there be the exact same situation with unaccompanied minors stranded after their flights were cancelled?
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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Pied Piper 
Joined: 20 May 2003
Location: Pig City
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^ Well, you can't really blame Magpie Jack's concerns - less than a fortnight ago Qantas "lost the paperwork" for a 11 year old (or thereabouts) who was then left wandering around Hobart airport looking for his mum. Thankfully she found him. She refused Qantas' offer of a free booking and is considering her legal options.
"Don't worry" a Qantas employee told her cheerfully. "They don't go missing too often!"
http://www.smh.com.au/travel/travel-news/qantas-loses-boy-rarely-happens-20111016-1lrir.html
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"The greatest thing that could happen to the nation is when we get rid of all the media. Then we could live in peace and tranquillity, and no one would know anything." - Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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LOL, yeah, fair enough.
I just think that a lot of people are letting the issue of Joyce's pay rise completely cloud their judgement on this issue.
Play out the whole scenario again with Qantas vs the unions, but this time Joyce gets no payrise at all.
Are his actions in locking out the employees and refusing to negotiate with unions over what he considers to be exorbitant demands suddenly more acceptable? If so, I'd love an explanation of why.
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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Pied Piper
Joined: 20 May 2003
Location: Pig City
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^ Joyce also announced 1000 Qantas jobs would go while in the middle of negotiations. Not exactly a conciliatory move.
Ben Sandilands at Crikey cuts through a lot of the bullshit here: http://blogs.crikey.com.au/planetalking/2011/10/30/interval-time-at-the-qantas-theatre-of-the-absurd/#comments
| Ben Sandilands wrote: | It’s interval time between the acts in the Qantas theatre of the absurd.
The patrons and the staff have been locked out, but the judges who have been called in to sort out the plot will not return to the bench until 2 pm, after last night’s epic opening performances which stretched into the early hours of today.
If the Qantas revenue figures for the previous financial year are a guide, its enacting of a plan to lock out its customers as well as three groups of union workers from late yesterday afternoon will cost it at least $30 million a day.
And it had over $3 billion in cash in hand at 30 June this year.
However it also has a fleet of around 140 aircraft, with 108 of them flying for the mainline Qantas operations and thus grounded, while the others continue flying for Qantaslink, or as the Jetconnect NZ based trans Tasman 737 operation.
Jetstar is unaffected, other than having apparently lost any shred of control as well as unknown sums of money in its Vietnamese franchise, Jetstar Pacific, which is to become an arm of state owned flag carrier Vietnamese Airlines, which is another cautionary story about starry eyed Asian investment adventures for a different time and place than one that is in turmoil because of the Qantas grounding.
Parts of the grounded Qantas fleet are subject to financing arrangements, so those aircraft are also no longer paying for the fixed costs they incur just standing still.
Added to obligations to stranded customers, and the thousands of hotel rooms the pilot union alleges that Qantas had pre-booked in preparation for yesterday’s ambush, losses of $40 million per day are not implausible, although reliable information on this and other topics has not yet been provided by management.
What Qantas did confirm, to the ASX on Friday prior to the AGM, was that the loss of revenue attributable to uncertainty over the industrial situation at Qantas was costing $15 million a week, which it described as unsustainable.
That figure may now be somewhere between $210-280 million a week, suggesting that there is much about the state of mind of the board and senior management that remains cause for concern as the hours tick down to the 2 pm resumption of the hearing by Fair Work Australia of an Australian government application for its intervention in the dispute because of the damage it is doing to the national economy.
The evidence given by the department of transport and infrastructure to FWA late last night about the importance of tourism specifically and air travel more generally to the national economy is compelling.
But the Qantas involvement with that contribution is in fact, much less compelling. As the airline often points out, almost with pride it seems, it is also so uncompetitive at the international level that it only carries 18% of the carriage, as flown by Australians and foreign visitors combined.
In aggregate it is the likes of Singapore Airlines, Emirates, Cathay Pacific and Thai International that do the heavy longer haul lifting, which excludes some of the nearer destinations apart from trans Tasman services, across which Emirated punts otherwise idle A380s and 777s that have time to spare between arriving from and departing to its Dubai hub at Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
It is important not to allow history to be rewritten by Qantas in relation to the rise of its foreign competitors. They didn’t force Qantas off routes to what have now become enormously important ‘secondary’ cities in Europe, or the more recently emerging routes to central Asia, northern Africa or ex Soviet era eastern Europe.
Qantas failed serve those routes, except via London, and its competitors filled the gap. If Emirates and Thai International and Singapore Airlines in particular had not demonstrated business acumen in flying one-stop to those destinations from Australia, the really valuable contribution Germany and the continent in general makes to Australian tourism would not have occurred as quickly or efficiently.
That growth has very little to do with the tired old anglo-centric view of the world that has seen Qantas struggle to understand new sources of long haul growth and persist with its ghastly reliance on transferring passengers to British Airways at London Heathrow, or for those who have been especially bad, via London Gatwick.
Emirates, Singapore Airlines and Thai International have been the future of Australian long haul tourism for some time, and now Etihad, in association with Virgin Australia, is also staking its claim in the void that Qantas still fails to address even if it finally understands it.
From next March Qantas actually halves its direct participation in the London market by seeking to hand the completion of two out of four daily flights to Heathrow to British Airways, a clever move that will undoubtedly persuade even more of its customers to switch instead to all-the-way carriers like Emirates or Singapore Airlines.
It makes the claimed Qantas commitment to tourism look shonky. Within Australia Qantas years ago abandoned or severely reduced its services to mass tourism destinations in Tasmania, to Queensland’s resort islands, and to its Gold and Sunshine Coasts.
Jetstar took over those services. It is unaffected by the Qantas industrial disputes.
Which means that much of the evidence the government provided about the national economic importance of air travel to tourism late last night is of reduced applicability to Qantas.
Inbound tourism to Australia has been severely impacted by the strong Australian dollar. In fact if the cost differential between Qantas and its most successful foreign carriers is only the 25% its CEO Alan Joyce referred to in public addresses and announcements in May and August is correct it would disappear if the Australian dollar went even halfway down to its lows against the USD, euro, pound sterling and yen in the first decade of this century.
Of course confidence in anything Mr Joyce says has been put under some stress this year. On 19 August he said the proposed venture to found an Asia based premium quality single aisle carrier in either Singapore or Kuala Lumpur would cost 1000 Qantas jobs. But at the AGM on Friday he said ‘not one Australian job’ would be lost because of that venture.
At that meeting he also said that without Qantas involvement, Airbus would never have produced its forthcoming NEO version of the A320 airline family.
That was delusional nonsense. Meanwhile NSW police resources are tied up searching for the perpetrators of alleged death threats against Qantas executives and workers. Those were very serious allegations, they are costing public money, they were made contrary to normal protocols not to ‘blow’ police investigations, and they need to be resolved, but that is also a story for another time.
It can be argued that the problems that Qantas claim to be experiencing are self inflicted, in that it chose not to address its major cost problem, fuel, with an appropriate investment in more fuel efficient airliners, such as the 777, and is now cutting back on its A380 orders, which is even more fuel efficient on trunk routes where slots or demand make a nonsense of services in anything but the biggest jet available.
That is not to avoid taking issue with union demands for ‘job security’. Those demands are way beyond the pale whether the company involved is supremely well run, or being managed poorly.
However there are critical political or public/national policy issues bound up in those demands as they apply to excellence in piloting and maintenance in not just old aircraft, but new more efficient designs.
And there are critical issues in relation to the Qantas Sale Act, including whether it might be a good time to abolish it, or take an alternative path and amend it to make it more relevant to the national interest.
Those issued are due to be addressed at a Senate inquiry starting this Friday. It is clear from the bills being considered in the course of that inquiry that the Qantas off shoring strategy by which lower labor costs in airline operations could be rotated through domestic flights that are extensions of international flights could be stopped in its tracks.
On the other hand the union arguments about Asia, and the somewhat risky catch cry against ‘Asianisation’ miss the point that finding a way to expand into the rapidly emerging air travel markets of the Asian hemisphere is highly desirable.
But there is no need to murder Qantas, or destroy its standards, in the process, other than the greedy temptation to drag the airline down to so called world’s best practice in training and safety.
Australian can export excellence rather than import mediocrity in the business of air transport.
These are matters Fair Work Australia is highly unlikely to consider when or if it makes a compulsory arbitration of the three Qantas disputes, with its long haul pilots, its licensed engineers, or its ground handlers.
Yet they are matters of immense importance that can be resolved in parliament, and may emerge into the spotlight once the purely industrial issues have been resolved. |
In short it's not just his pay packet which grates, though it inevitably does. How could it not? As consumers, we're seeing reductions in services, reductions in safety, Australian jobs being lost, the share price tank, and the CEO get rewarded. And you wonder why people start to think "What's wrong with this picture?" and start taking to the streets!
_________________
"The greatest thing that could happen to the nation is when we get rid of all the media. Then we could live in peace and tranquillity, and no one would know anything." - Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen
Last edited by Pied Piper on Sun Oct 30, 2011 1:53 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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HAL
Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.
Joined: 17 Mar 2003
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| Oops. Too much data. |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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Interesting article.
One thing that stood out though was when the writer claimed that Qantas had abandond routes which Jetstar then took up.
| Quote: | It makes the claimed Qantas commitment to tourism look shonky. Within Australia Qantas years ago abandoned or severely reduced its services to mass tourism destinations in Tasmania, to Queensland’s resort islands, and to its Gold and Sunshine Coasts.
Jetstar took over those services. It is unaffected by the Qantas industrial disputes. |
That's twisting the argument to incite a particular opinion.
Qantas owns Jetstar, so if it still services those routes, albeit with a budget carrier that it owns rather than a full service carrier, how does that make their commitment to tourism look shonky?
Qantas may well have been gazumped in it's international long haul flights by competitors who took over market share. Is that because of poor strategic decision making or did they pull out of areas that they were noncompetitive in because of costs?
It's a good article but I don't think it cuts through the bullshit, just scrapes off a few layers then applies a coat of it's own.
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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Proud Pies
Joined: 22 Feb 2003
Location: Knox-ish
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annewilo
Joined: 22 Mar 2003
Location: Victoria Park
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^^ they will get their qantas money back so it isn't double dipping as they are being offered discounted fares.
PS I think if ppl want a discount airline then fair enough but Qants already have one.
I am disgusted in Joyce making Qantas into to a Ryan Air. A lot of people liked flying Qantas for what it stands for and paying a little extra to get it.
Airline safety should never be leverage in a union and company dispute in an airline of all businesses!
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