Originally Posted by
SDN Superstar
Qlink had foreign pilots up in QLD on skilled shortage visas flying through stand down while more senior pilots on the sustaining fleet were stood down on jobkeeper. The government was paying Australian pilots to sit at home while foreigners flew sectors for the national carrier.
Let that sink in if you think that this will be managed within the spirit and the intent of your EAs. You can’t look through a “pre-COVID” filter for any of this.
Those SA crew are treated exactly like everyone else on the EBA. They get their stand down on a rotating basis, just like everyone else on the 400. Line crew are stood down on a rotating basis according to seniority. The only exception at the moment is the C&T are avoiding stand down mostly to train the Q300 crew to the Q400.
However, as a result of their visa the SA crew can't claim JobKeeper or seek alternative employment. So they burn their leave mostly to keep some money coming in. Those leave balances aren’t infinite and now no one can go into a negative leave balance.
Think about the implications of that for a minute when there is no concrete end date to stand downs.
Do you hear them complaining? Just about all of them (There’s always someone who isn’t happy, isn’t there SDN?) are extremely grateful to be doing what they’re doing.
The grounding of the classic fleet and subsequent stand down was a commercial decision. QLink don’t choose which fleet flies where, commercial do. They decided the 400 was a better machine to use overall. Thats all there was to it.
Once the company came out that the 300 was done in QLD, they moved reasonably quickly to get the training organised. Given the number of crew to be trained and all of the border restrictions, I don’t think they’ve done that bad a job at that part of it.
By and large, the 400 crew all feel for the classic crew who got stood down. It wasn’t necessarily fair or even, but that wasn’t the goal when this kicked off.
Most are hopefully thankful that their stand down wasn’t potentially 3 years or more like many of their mates over at the mothership.