The whole exercise, not just the ALAEA's battle, but also the AIPA's, has nothing to do with anything except breaking the unions base and leverage. This battle has been prepared for since 2008, the purpose is to drag it out as long as possible.
It's Oldmeadow inc IR strategy as per previous campaigns. They are not interested in negotiations they are interested in what its going to cost them. If it costs them too much they'll say 'yes heres a deal' like last time. If it costs them nothing they'll keep it going a bit longer.
There's no need to get emotional about anything. For Oldmeadow and Sue Bussell and Chris Nassenstein its just a job, part of the job is working out a deal which benefits your employer moreso then it benefits the workers you employ. They throw a few curly ones at you and hope you bite back. A few numbers of redundancies are put out there in the hope you're all so scared you'll demand you union cave in and accept anything.
It's just one big game to them, they don't care, an executive or consultants fee for the year is already locked away, to them its just another scalp to put in their LinkedIn profile. There is nothing in our current management's team that has anything to do with anything except reducing costs.
Reducing costs whilst CPI is going up means cutting. That's the metric our short term KPI driven management are focused on and that's what they aim for. You may aim to fix the defect and prevent a delay or you may aim to do the job safely, properly with years of knowledge and experience behind you but that doesn't translate into money for a KPI driven manager so its disregarded. 2 totally different goals which are incompatible with one another.. Maybe sometime in the past they were compatible, but it hasn't been compatible since the career stream for an engineer stopped being a segment management position and finished at a local DMM level.
Management don't care about previous culture, none of our current management have been brought up in Qantas so they don't care. Nassenstein is bringing his Air Transat and Air NZ experience and applying it to Qantas. Joyce is applying his Jetstar greenfields experiment which is gifted with free cash and no bills and applying it to the the bill payer.
And just remember the longer the 'dispute' lasts, the more the consultants get paid. Whose interest is it in to settle quickly ?