dj, the AFAP fought the integration case in the mid nineties. QF and the Regional GM's major argument was the cost of retraining and the movement of staff would severely hurt the companies. The IRC (in their wisdom) based their decision on a similar integration issue that had been decided years earlier between NSW Rail and its employees. In this case the employees wanted integration from one type of train into another type operated by NSW Rail (I'm sorry, I don't know the exact details). In the end, the IRC decided that the NSW Rail employees shouldn't have integration. The IRC applied the same rules to the QF integration issue and thus the AFAP (along with all QF regional pilots) lost the fight.
This raises several points:
1) Why did the IRC use the NSW Rail case as its benchmark considering there had already been many years of successful integration within airlines in Australia and overseas?
2) The cost to QF for the loss of expertise, loyalty, experience and company knowledge when a QF regional pilot resigns to join a competitor airline surely must far outweigh the cost of retraining,
3) Companies like Cathay, Dragon, Impulse, Virgin, BA etc must be clicking their heels at the thought that they have access to a large group of highly skilled multi-crew pilots, trained under one of the best (QF approved and overseen) cyclic systems in Australia, using an advanced (CAT5 ??) DHC-8 simulator. These companies have been snapping up QF regional pilots by the bucket loads for the past 5 years.
4) It appears that QF don’t want integration NOT because of the training costs (which would be less because the regional pilot is already in the system, and which would be incurred regardless), but because of the fight they put up against EAA and the AFAP over the integration issue, and the QF managers and regional managers would rather lose their talented pilots to other airlines rather than admit a mistake they made in the nineties!
Food for thought