bulldog, the fittest operator's are not necessarily the ones with the most dough. Being fit in the business world includes but is not limited to cash. Its as much who you know as what you know. Certaintly in the past Ansett had been allowed to enter into anti competetive agreements with respect to terminal leases and the like, all designed to make it as hard as possible for a competitor to get a start in the industry. Deregulation has not been a disaster for anyone except the operators not able to put themselves in a competetive position in the market. What QF does to survive with or with out the help of the government is just the way the wheel turns. That wheel turned for AN in the past as well. I guess I don't like the way the privitisation of QF was handled any more than you but if I owned a company that I wanted to sell shares in I too would clean up the debt sheet to make the sale as attractive as possible. Murdoch could have done the same for AN if he chose to but he didn't.
This bullcrap about Virgin coming in and "cherry picking" and underpaying staff is a mis-nomer as well. To suggest that staff have been cherry picked in my mind is to suggest that people were drawn away from better paying jobs. How bout you go knock on your neighbours door and tell him how bad off a person is who makes $115,000 a year or even $65,000 for that matter. The base pay for flight attendants is still above the national average income. The so called industry standard that keeps getting kicked around on this forum in relation to
VB and Impulse wages has been looked at from a rather upside down perspective. The industry standard is NOT what the best payed people make its what the lowest payed people make. If pilots are willing to get out of bed each day and fly a 737 or 717 for $110,000-115,000 a year than thats what the standard is. Anyone making more is above the so called standard. Thats why you have negotiated working conditions so that the the lowest level of salary and conditions is not allowed to deteriorate to a SUB standard, hardly the condition at
VB. Ever Notice how few whingers there are on this forum from
VB? There aren't many in the company that why. Can't say the same for QF and AN staff. I would say as far as company culture and moral goes
VB is way above the "industry standard".
As for these government subsidies to
VB, well thats the perogative of which ever government wants to attract
VB into their market. The subsidies won't last forever and AN seems to want the same sort of consessions to get going again. You don't get what you deserve in this life, only what you negotiate. Good on Branson and anyone else that gets help getting started. As for wizzing in the wind about how an already established operator runs their business as another makes such a start well tough titties, you want a piece of the action you have to hit the groung running and Ansett will have to do the same. If QF wants to sell a million discounted seats thats their business. Lets face it,
VB is their competion and they will have to sell cheaper seats to keep their market share even without AN back in the skies. If the AN administrators cannot get together a business plan that will survive in a market sure to have discounted fares for the long term then they don't have a business to sell. Nobody's fault, it's just life in the real world. The old Ansett couldn't survive in that world and if the new Ansett is going to any better then the plan of attack must be centered around competing with the discounted market, not the fat end of the yield spectrum.