AIPA has been proven to be useless and ineffective in the last six months
In the last six months?? QF pilots signed what amounted in the long term to a death warrant to their professional careers (along with the careers of every Australian domestic and GA pilot as well) when they broke away from the AFAP to form AIPA. Disaster didn’t strike overnight after the formation of AIPA, but over the last 20+ years, like Chinese water torture, management throughout the industry has been able to erode conditions to their current state in a ‘drip by drip’ fashion using divide and conquer tactics that would never have worked against a united pilot force. And this is thanks
in large part to the people who broke away from the AFAP to form AIPA.
Those who think this is too simplistic, ask yourselves what would have happened if we had had a single, united pilot group in 1989. At the very best, the situation would never have been allowed to degenerate into the fiasco it became because Ansett (and to a lesser degree, Australian Airlines) ‘management’ would never have dared to adopt the brinkmanship mode of management they followed to purposely precipitate what became known as the Pilots’ Dispute. At the worst, a united pilot group would have forced management to the negotiating table within days, and commonsense – on both sides of the table – may well have prevailed.
The only way we’re ever going to recover even half of what we one had is to follow the well documented
but incredibly difficult path Dick Holt led the pilot group through back in the 60’s. To do so again today would not be impossible, (despite what many heroic individuals within today’s pilot ranks would say to the contrary), but it would be difficult, even with a totally united pilot workforce, which you only have to read this thread to see we do not have.
Realistically, it will be
extremely difficult thanks to the large number of ‘heroes’ (and, from the comments of some I read here, wannabe heroes) within our ranks.
Unfortunately, thanks in large part to the mistakes made by the pilot group as a whole in the not too distant past, those heroes are with us, along with the potential heroes who see individual blacklegging or undercutting a group of pilots’ wages or conditions claim as a ‘clever’ way of gaining employment or a quick promotion, and management will take full advantage of this.
If we Australian pilots are ever to succeed in dragging ourselves from the industrial abyss we’ve sunk into in recent years, we’re going to have to form a united front again or be doomed to sink even lower until this profession won’t be worth pursuing. So, for a start, quite a few of us are going to have to put a stop to this patently silly “Impulse versus Mainline” and ‘my **’s bigger than your’s is’ rubbish.
PS: I hadn’t read
Keg’s post when I wrote the above. I have to admit he’s said what I was trying to say far better than I did. Maybe it’s time AIPA sat down with the AFAP and talked (re)amalgamation. Everyone would have to compromise, but the end result would be an organization that represented us
all, which would have to be for the better. I can’t see this happening unless a majority of AIPA members demand it.