Qantas looks abroad for staff
Mon "The Australian"
Qantas looks abroad for staff
By Steve Creedy
January 17, 2005
QANTAS is planning to shift more jobs and services overseas as chief executive Geoff Dixon claims the national flag carrier can no longer afford to be an "all-Australian" business.
In a blunt warning to staff and the Australian public, Mr Dixon told The Australian the airline had no choice but to source more of its people, services and products overseas in order to remain competitive.
"We can't sit here and be all-Australian," Mr Dixon said in foreshadowing renewed confrontation with unions over cost controls and job relocation.
About 94 per cent of Qantas's 35,000 staff are Australian-based, a figure the airline claims is the highest of any global international carrier.
Based on international benchmarks, Mr Dixon's determination to improve competitiveness would result in more than 7000 jobs moving overseas. He said the airline industry was changing dramatically, with competing carriers Singapore Airlines and Cathay Pacific lowering costs by consistently sourcing about 30 per cent of products and services such as engineering and in-flight services from other countries.
Mr Dixon's comments come only two months after Qantas won a battle to save more than $18 million a year in hotel bills and allowances by increasing the number of its London-based flight attendants from 370 to 870.
During the dispute over relocation, Qantas was accused of training 37 strike-breaking flight attendants after unions threatened to disrupt Christmas flights.
Eventually, as part of a three-year enterprise agreement, the Flight Attendants Association of Australia accepted the new 870 cap, which will result in 22 per cent of Qantas's long-haul flight attendants being based overseas. In response to Mr Dixon's latest comments, the FAAA international division secretary Michael Mijatov said Qantas was one of the world's most profitable airlines and he believed jobs should be kept in Australia.
"I'll be buggered, come the next three years, whether they're going to have any increased numbers," he said. "That's it as far as we're concerned. It has become stale and tired, this constant rhetoric about doom and gloom, while at the same time (Qantas executives) pad their pockets like there's no tomorrow."
But Mr Dixon said Qantas, which made a record profit of $648 million in 2003-2004 - making it second only to Singapore Airlines as the world's most successful airline - had no choice but to continue to look at opportunities offshore. He said carriers restructuring in the US under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection - abandoning pension funds and making massive unilateral cuts to wages and conditions - would emerge leaner and meaner.
At the same time, governments in Asia were supporting airlines, and carriers were being allowed to merge in the European Union.
"To compete with that we're going to have get the lowest cost structure we can and that will mean sourcing things more and more from overseas," he said.
"It doesn't mean we'll be any less Australian and it certainly doesn't mean mass redundancies or anything like that."
The Qantas boss took aim at unions, saying a failure to negotiate on productivity improvements could restrict investment in any of the airline's business units that fell behind international benchmarks.
International flight attendants at Australian airlines have again threatened strike action over efforts to introduce new pay scales and a new roster system.
The Australian
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