Inside Business 28th November
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Employment policies are not safety concerns: Joyce - Inside Business - ABC
ALAN KOHLER, PRESENTER: By any measure it's been a pretty awful month for Qantas.
The potentially devastating disintegration of an engine in one of the new A380 with 466 souls on board spawned a global media frenzy.
And that incident over Indonesia was quickly followed by a succession of other mishaps and turn backs and just this week a pilot at Jetstar was sacked after criticising the low cost subsidiary's off-shore employment policy and the effect it could have on safety.
More headlines, more damage control. By the end of the week Qantas did manage to get two of its multibillion-dollar A380 fleet back into limited service with the boss, Alan Joyce, on board.
Appearing comfortable and relaxed of course.
I spoke to him before he boarded the flight to London.
Alan Joyce, how do you reconcile the sacking of Joe Eakins, the Jetstar pilot, for raising safety concerns when you've always said that you would never discipline anyone for raising safety concerns?
ALAN JOYCE, CEO QANTAS: Yeah well in this case the pilot in question didn't raise safety concerns. He raised issues that are industrial relations issues related to employment in Singapore and relating to progression within the organisation. Nothing to do with safety.
ALAN KOHLER: Well he did say that lower pay that you're paying in Singapore will lead to safety problems.
ALAN JOYCE: What the pilots in Singapore are actually employed to fly for Jetstar Asia which is a Singapore entity, flying and competing against all of the carriers in the region and the pilots are paid quite well.
They're paid in the top few per cent of the population in that country. So there's no issues here with safety and I think in the case of this pilot, he did break the code of conduct. It is very clear what the code of conduct for the organisation is. That was broken on multiple occasions.
He was given opportunities to come in and talk about why he was doing it and to correct the action. He refused to come in and talk to the management and the management were left with no other action but to actually terminate his employment.
There were other pilots there, there was another pilot did the same thing and the process ended with that pilot understanding what the code of conduct was and he stopped the conduct. Now I have to say Jetstar, like all of Qantas, really takes safety reporting as a top priority. We get thousands of reports every year that we pass on to the ATSB and a lot that we look at ourselves. We go out and encourage reporting when it's related to safety issues.
When something is related to industrial relations issues and it's a breach of the code of conduct we're going to act in that way. And again, for the union to use this as an example and use this to say it's all about safety is them using the safety card for industrial relations. It's purely that yet again. It is outrageous that they keep doing this.