INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS – Airline Pilots 1964-1969
Pilot industrial relations reflected the continual efforts by pilots to gain a unique status. The Australian industrial relations system, whilst constantly evolving, at no stage really met the demands of the pilots for the recognition they sought. This led to ongoing frustration, the impact of which was highlighted by Blain and Yerbury. Pilots sought to gain a unique status for their occupation with salaries measured in international terms that reflected their view of a pilot's skill, position, responsibility, risk, hours of work, the potential brevity of their careers due to medical requirements and the need to continually re-qualify.
Efforts to achieve this recognition can be traced back to March 1954 when the Pilots Association organised its first stopwork, prior to the commencement of the Full Court hearing to determine the basis of pilot salary determination. The Court undertook an assessment of salaries which recognised the unique or 'sui generis' nature of a pilots occupation as follows
We have already said sufficient to indicate that the profession of an air pilot is "sui generis". It is claimed by the Association, and there is much to support the claim, that there is no profession or occupation in Australia to which an air pilot's position as far as skill, responsibility and other features which bear upon the fixation of a proper salary can be compared with any precision.
Yet the judges determined pilot salaries in line with the standard Australian assessment of the time, the metal trades, with a margin for pilot duties.
In 1959, the pilots association opted out of this system. They dissolved their association and created the non-registered Australian Federation of Air Pilots.
It was not until 1964 that strike action was reverted to, this time in the case of Qantas. A mediator was agreed and a settlement reached, paving the way for an agreement of the method of direct negotiations known as the Bland Agreement. The agreement was modelled upon the American Railway Labor Act and set a formula including aspects such as a cooling off period before direct action.
The claim for an American style pay and bidding system continued and flared again whilst pilots operated under these procedures. In 1966, Professor Isaac investigated domestic pilot salaries, bidding systems, seniority, etc. and recommended a 15% increase in salaries. He considered the salaries of professional engineers in commonwealth employment, third division commonwealth public servants and judges in reaching this conclusion.
Shortly after this report, the domestic pilots achieved a significant victory, agreeing to the introduction of the American styled type weight formula, bidding and seniority systems and a 26% salary increase over 2 years.
However, after the 27 days Qantas stoppage in 1966 to achieve this same outcome, the government amended the Conciliation and Arbitration Act to make the AFAP a declared body under the Act, under a specialist tribunal, the Flight Crew Officers Industrial Tribunal (FCOIT). The government felt, the need for a cessation of the turbulence and disorder in an essential industry such as the airlines traffic.
This was also a most unusual step and was only the second time that a Tribunal had been created, the first being the Coal Industry Tribunal. The pilots had to this extent been brought back into the fold.
This simplified historical outline, analysed in more detail by Blain and Yerbury, reveals that ongoing tensions plagued pilot industrial relations. In pursuit of specific recognition and international relativities, pilots were prepared to pursue their interests through collective bargaining, potentially outside the wages system of the day. Their industrial strength and effective organisation, allowed them to succeed in this approach.
In their struggles to achieve a unique status also won the pilots few friends amongst the union movement and the Labor Party. The AFAP was not affiliated with the ACTU, unlike the majority of Australian unions and was not politicly aligned. The media portrayal of pilots as overpaid elitists, as illustrated by the clippings which interweave this thesis, did little to win the sympathy of fellow unionists. Ongoing tensions existed between the aspirations for equality of other unions and the ALP, government wages policies, and pilot aspirations.
CONCLUSION
In Pilot Horizons, in 1984, the federation manager L. J. Coysh commented,
I know you've heard it before but you must now, more than ever, stick close together. You have an ACTU who is committed to ‘bringing the elitists back to the fold', and an Opposition Government that believes in deregulation because it works well in Supermarkets. Instead of looking at each other through commercially coloured glasses put your arm around each other in 1985. If you've got any affection left show it to the Flight Engineers, Flight Attendants and the Air Traffic Controllers because whether you like it or not the next couple of years are going to be harder rather than easier.
The pilots and their representative organisation highly valued their professional status and their role in the aviation community. This perception was reinforced by technology and the lifestyle implications of a pilots work which emphasised an occupational community. Yet, there was a recognition that pilots alone did not determine their own status or role and their fortunes were effected by airlines and the government through its wages and aviation policy.
These forces, which shaped the pilots identity as an occupational community, also created the tensions of pilot salary determination and how the pilots would respond to their environment through the use of their industrial strength. Government industrial relations and aviation policy were moving in a direction would place greater strain upon pilot aspirations.
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Pilot Salary Determination - Whitlam to Keating
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