Originally Posted by
Beer Baron
Getting caught up feeling like we need to “break the wage policy” is thinking with your heart rather than your head. An EA negotiation should be about achieving measurable outcomes that improve terms and conditions, not just venting your anger. Sticking it to your employer, breaking the wage policy or trashing the operation for no perceivable gain are emotional responses, but unlikely to be productive.
The company negotiators put a price on everything the pilots request/demand. If you ask for something that will cost Qantas tens of millions of dollars (ie. further pay rises to other employee groups) then they will expect that such a cost will be offset by stripping other conditions from YOUR EA. Sure you can press the issue and hold to your demands but Intractable Bargaining will shut you down in the end (as we’ve just seen).
So why not do what EFA, Jetstar and the engineers all did, appear to apply the pay freeze but put the pay back in elsewhere in the EA.
From the rumours going about, it seems like we may be able to use this wage policy to fix a myriad of major issues that have been dogging short haul for years but the company have never previously been willing to fix.
Focus on the content of the EA, not a policy or pent up anger.
Yeah? NAA has flipped a client into a major (and well resourced) competitor that is taking its staff… and paying them 50% more. I’m not saying rolling strikes were the only reason for that, but they certainly didn’t hurt. We’ll see how this plays out but playing their game to try to get systemic change has never yielded results like that.