Originally Posted by
blubak
Its not industrial action,nothing to do with it.
Its the contracted company now doing the job of long serving airline employees with a lot less staff employed at lower pay levels & not really caring whose bag gets on the right aircraft or not.
& why would they,casual wages,no guarantee of hours or wages each week.
Oh, come off it, seriously. The entire industry, despite there being some good people, has watched for decades as these people played cards in the lunch room between flights, sometimes for hours on end, slept on the job, milked the rosters for every ounce of 50% penalties and overtime, featherbedded every job to the point where they had more people doing the same work than the providers that are now taking over.
Qantas has used 'contractors' at every port outside Australia for decades. The Ramp and Baggage are going because, just like overseas, in places like San Francisco where Qantas used to have its own staff, it became economically insane to employ people full time to do a job that you could pay a marginal rate for to be done by a service provider who utilised those staff outside the Qantas operation.
Once upon a time when there were no independent ground handlers in Australia and airlines provided the ground handling, with even TAA and Ansett doing international handling, it made sense. Ever since independent handlers were brought in and were able to cross-utilise resources over a number of client airlines, the 'airline' based handling operations became unsustainable. This has been coming for decades, it's amazing it's taken this long. Anybody who denies that this lot have been milking the cow for decades is either too close to the group themselves or walking around blind.
Everybody knows from decades of experience how this particular group and their union has at times gone to bat for people who stole, fought and lazed their way to a wage. There have been some great people work in those areas but unfortunately they have had to wear the reputation of the worst elements and it appears as though the union was never interested in the employees but political power, dragging them out onto the grass over the most trivial matters.
Some of us are old enough to remember, to give one example, the Rower's Club near SIT being colloquially referred to as the "TWU Lunchroom" and other such epithets. None of those type of things were ever levelled or justified against the upstairs/customer service operation, they were nowhere near as militant or manipulative.
Well, eventually the gravy train stops and the consumers of the gravy get offloaded. Like others have said, this is no surprise, the only surprise is it's taken this long.