From the aviation section of business spectator.com
FLYING HIGH
by Robert Stockdill
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Posted 31 Mar 2009 11:12 AM
The enemy within Qantas
Monday’s wildcat strike by Qantas staff has appropriately identified the Transport Workers Union (TWU) as the carrier’s enemy within. It was probably the most ill-considered and fundamentally stupid act of any Australian trade union in nearly a decade.
Anyone who can read a newspaper or log onto the internet knows full well we’ve been sucked into a recession not of our own making. While it might not be quite as bad as mainstream media headline writers would have us believe, it remains a recession.
Companies are cutting costs to protect themselves from falling revenues. Workers are being made redundant as order books shrink. And one of the worst-affected industries at present is the aviation sector. Falling fuel prices may be helping overheads return to reasonable levels, but any benefit in falling costs is being outpaced by falling revenues, as companies fund fewer business trips and private travellers tighten their belts, either staying at home or opting to travel with budget airlines rather than full service carriers.
Members of the TWU would be well advised to ask whether federal secretary Tony Sheldon can read, or is keeping abreast of the economic climate, judging by his decision to sanction a snap strike on Monday.
Pulling workers off the job on Monday morning disrupted the travel plans of thousands of Australians and cost their employer a small fortune it can ill afford at this time.
There was absolutely no reasonable or legal purpose for this strike. In a rant to the media, Sheldon told the news media and Qantas management the strike was called due to security issues raised by inappropriate security accreditation of non-union staff members. In the next breath, it was something to do with contracting external workers to carry out unionised jobs. Then he tried to establish a link between security screening and the murder of a bikie gang member at Sydney Airport, in a public place anyone can walk without screening.
It was all utter nonsense and the mainstream media for once covered it well, transcribing Sheldon’s nonsense verbatim. Security screening is not part of Qantas' role – that’s the responsibility of higher government authorities. And as a Qantas spokesman subtly put it, the claim people were working in high security zones without being screened was “rubbish”.
Last year, the TWU concocted a campaign to restrict the weight of single items of checked baggage, because it claimed its members were sustaining injuries lifting the bags. Qantas management was then far too polite to state the bleeding obvious: if you can’t lift a bag weighing 32kg – the limit applied throughout the planet – then perhaps a career in baggage handling isn’t the right vocation.
A cynic might have suggested such people could apply for jobs at the union instead, so they could come up with even more absurd reasons to call their members out on strike.
That these characters are damaging their long-term job prospects will bother few members of the travelling public. They have other concerns – we’ve all read in the newspapers about organised baggage theft rings operating at Sydney Airport. Some of us – myself included – have had items stolen from their bags and consider the risk of it happening again an occupational hazard of flying through Sydney.
The greater concern here is the impact these time-warp-trapped unionists will have on their employer. Boldly striving to overcome falling revenues, image problems, fuel hedging miscalculations, management restructuring and a recession, Qantas now has to go into battle with a new foe – the enemy within.
There was no valid reason whatsoever for Monday’s strike and the prospect of customers blaming Qantas for the unreasonable travel delays is real and unwarranted.
For all its faults of 2008, Qantas has been navigating its way through the industry turmoil relatively well in the last three months. The last thing it needed was an unwarranted attack from within by a bunch of people willing to risk their jobs to pursue their own agenda, which they failed to coherently explain to anyone on Monday.
In the end they may have accelerated their journey into oblivion. Having positioned themselves as a dedicated enemy of their employer, why wouldn’t Qantas ditch the lot of them in favour of outside contractors?