I am an AO flight attendant and am very worried about the future. The fact that the "brand" has gone doesn't concern me at all, we knew for a long time that something was going to happen with us and the change was nothing unexpected. What does worry me is we "haven't" been absorbed but continue as we are still employed by Australian providing wet lease to QF. What does that mean? Why are Qantas paying to lease their own aircraft, cabin crew and pilots? Are they just trying to keep the peace by not making 300 cabin crew redundant? The pilots are fine, they slip back into QF but maybe it's because of the pilot issue we didn't succeed. Our pilots are still on QF pay, not good for a start up entrant where as I believe JStar Int have a different agreement. AO was a great company and will remain that until we are given the "move on" at the end of 2007 when our EBA expires. What happens then? To all the QF crew bitching about us undercutting their conditions what would you do? If you are offered a flying job are you going to turn it down? Probably not. QF havent hired cabin crew for years so from a personal point of view count your selves very lucky that you have what you have. Don't think for a moment that we would'nt rather be where you are, it just wasn't going to happen when we were employed, so we took flying jobs that were available, at AO. In the end we still do the same job, no one is better than anyone else, our coffee tastes the same as yours.
What happens in the future is unsure but we have a great bunch of crew here in Cairns, infact we won the SkyTrax award for best cabin crew. I hope that is taken into account when or if they offer positions within QF.
My main concern now is what will happen to us, do we have a future or not?