Originally Posted by
CamelSquadron
Finally - employees are not saving the company by burning all their leave and entitlements - the company still has to pay out the cash for those. What employees are doing is SAVING THEIR JOBS. Because the alternative is to make the employees redundant or send them home on LWOP.
What a stupid, stupid comment.
‘Stand-down’
is LWOP.
An employee who takes their leave as assigned/awarded each year will have near zero leave balance, they will be advanced 4 weeks leave and after that they are
un-paid. They have told us it is a minimum stand-down of 8 weeks and likely much longer. So from week 4 that employee is on LWOP indefinitely.
If a company makes you redundant then they have to pay you for your notice period and then pay out all your leave entitlements. Qantas are providing us NO notice period, drip feeding us our entitlements and when exhausted you are paid
nothing. Not much different from being made redundant except a better chance of being re-hired at the end of it.
My leave has value. Long haul pilots have a contract provision (in ordinary times) to sell leave back to the company and it is worth a considerable amount of money. Now that leave and its value is being used to prop-up the company. Shareholders are not contributing one cent to the company’s survival, the government assistance package is equivalent to about 1-2 weeks of employee wages.
If Qantas survives this crisis it is entirely on the back of its stood down work force.
Sadly I expect that when we get through this and return to boom times there will be no reward for the employees who saved the airline but there will be dividends, buy-backs and executive bonuses to make your eyes water.