The Guardian 21 May, 2008
QANTAS pulled back
from war on engineers
Bob Briton
A strike by QANTAS’ licensed engineers was narrowly averted last Friday but a showdown still looms over the company’s intransigence toward the union’s modest pay claim. Secret plans to recruit scab engineers from Australia and overseas and to put them up at hotels near several Australian cities were blown in the media. Talks with the Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association (ALAEA) are recommencing but QANTAS is maintaining its "whatever it takes" attitude to beating down any non-executive pay claims above 3 percent.
"They want to break a wages policy that has given QANTAS … double-digit growth [for] about the last six years, has enabled us to invest $35 billion in new aircraft and has increased jobs by about 10,000. So we’re not going to allow it. We’re implacable about this", company CEO Geoff Dixon told The Australian Financial Review recently.
Implacable is not quite the word for QANTAS’ attitude; fanatical is more like it. In order to break the union campaign for a meagre 5 percent wage rise (in place of the company’s below-inflation offer of 3 percent and a 1 percent rise in super contributions), QANTAS started making some pretty expensive strikebreaking plans.
Newport Aviation — a labour hire firm registered just before enterprise bargaining (EB) talks with QANTAS broke down last September — was called in to recruit "management engineers". QANTAS is not new to this type of innovation; it began recruiting cut-price cabin crew trained in Thailand and New Zealand through former airline union official Maurice Alexander in 2003.
Newport started advertising for up to 100 maintenance engineers on a "fixed-term casual" basis, paying $2,308 a week and a $40,000 "completion bonus". Last week, engineers (including ex-pat Australians and New Zealanders) were boarding planes as far away as Malaysia and Singapore. Reports in The Sydney Morning Herald revealed that they were being moved into hotels near airports in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane, Adelaide, Darwin, Perth and some regional airports in readiness for the next stage of the war against the union’s EB claim.
The union had played its role strictly by the book. It was taking protected action with an overtime ban and held a secret ballot for two stop work meetings on May 16 and 23. QANTAS knew that it would not be legal to simply dismiss its union workforce and replace it with scabs as Patrick stevedores did on the waterfront in 1998. But, as ALAEA National Secretary Steve Purvinas noted, it "can lock our members out of the gate indefinitely until we accede to their below-inflation offer". That was the state of play when ACTU President Sharan Burrow stepped in last week.
QANTAS has had a long-running campaign against its local engineering staff. The company’s aim for some time has been to move its maintenance operations offshore and do things on the cheap. In 2004, it started closing its biggest heavy maintenance facility at Sydney Airport. It finished the job off in 2006 with the loss of 256 licensed aircraft engineer positions and several hundred support staff.
Last year, QANTAS tried to wriggle out of its obligation to place six engineers remaining in Sydney in other jobs after arguing that the Australian facility didn’t have the capacity to perform the maintenance work it was then sending overseas. It also tried to get pilots to do their own pre-flight safety checks for things like "bird strike", damaged tyres and leaks.
When QANTAS looked like falling into the hands of a consortium last year, all deals were off. The then Transport Minister, Mark Vaille, said that the Howard government was not about to "micro-manage" QANTAS by insisting its maintenance be largely carried out in Australia. It remains to be seen if the intervention of the ACTU, a new federal government and a workforce committed to action will be able to turn QANTAS management’s confrontational approach around.