Originally Posted by
dr dre
Funny how the female majority cabin crew workforce manage to work the exact same rosters and work holidays, Christmas etc without suffering any of these problems which a lot of people here think would supposedly prevent female pilots from being able to do the job.
You may have made that comment tongue-in-cheek Dre, but it is actually a very valid question and there actually is an answer.
Under the legislation (and I don’t have it in front of me right now but I have read it before, so I may not have it accurate but I will give you the vibe), an employer must provide reasonable flexible working conditions to carers, so long as it does not unreasonably inconvenience the employer.
With a large female flight attendant workforce, Qantas is able to refuse carer conditions to flight attendants, because Qantas can reasonably demonstrate that they would otherwise be unable to crew flights 24/7/365 because a significant proportion of their workforce would actually qualify as carers. Hence NO flight attendants qualify for carers rosters. That is actually the case - there may be minority exceptions but certainly childcare does not qualify a flight attendant special treatment. They generally seem to understand that and many of them leave at some point. There are some career flight attendants but not a large proportion these days. They also have part-time provisions which pilots don’t generally have (despite the best efforts in recent EBA’s). Part-time is unattractive to employers of pilots because the overheads are very high.
However, with a mere 5% female pilot workforce, Qantas cannot make the same argument for pilots. Therefore, they find themselves legally obliged to give the female pilots a roster that suits their childcare requirements. This is typically something like working 3 days per week with all weekends off (B737 - I don’t have current knowledge of how it’s going in the long haul fleets). On the B737 in Qantas, many females with young children work to such a roster. Despite the overall average of females being currently around 5%, the demographic is such that the bulk of the females are currently junior, so the actual percentage in some bases and ranks is a lot higher than 5%, and so yes, the males, (many of whom also have kids) do actually end up having to work most of the weekends. I am not speaking here for what is proposed, I am describing what is actually happening now.
Now, someone above questioned my knowledge of the legislation when I mentioned that these carers rosters were only available to females. That was a bloody good question, and while I again can’t give a concrete answer, I can give you my understanding. The legislation, of course, does not discriminate for gender when defining who qualifies as a “carer”. But Qantas gets to discriminate on gender because a large number of their male pilots actually qualify as carers. Therefore they use the “flight attendant” argument for their male pilots! They can’t give them all carers rosters because they would run out of pilots. Yet, they hand them out to female pilots with kids almost no question asked. Now that might be legally questionable, but I think Qantas spend almost as much on lawyers as they do on
PR, so good luck to anyone challenging it. I actually asked AIPA to challenge it many moons ago and I never actually heard the response because the background laughter kind of made the point for me. So as it currently stands, a female pilot can get a carers roster simply if she has kids. A male pilot cannot.
Having said all that, I will leave it to others to speculate what impact a progressive increase in female numbers will have. However, I will put out a suggestion that if it gets to a certain threshold, it is quite possible that suddenly the “flight attendant argument” will become valid for female pilots: “Sorry, there are now
too many of you. We will have to start treating you equally with the male pilots. Carer’s rosters are no longer available, you are now required to be available 24/7/365 just like your male colleagues.”
So, to my good female pilot colleagues: be careful what you wish for.