The ALAEA Enterprise Agreement negotiation team met with Qantas this morning to discuss further our next wage Agreement. The ALAEA opened requesting answers to the 61 questions regarding the alleged losses on the International arm of the business. Qantas would not answer the questions and instead decided it best if we firstly talk about the announcement by the airline to run down the backbone of the Qantas Group by reducing Qantas services in favour of new entities.
A breakdown of the redundancies was explained with the following impact on Engineering. Qantas advised us that the changes take effect from April 2012 and may not all necessarily be voluntary.
20-30 in Base Maintenance Sydney due to the retirement of 4 x 747-400 aircraft.
128 LAMEs across the country due to the commencement of maintenance on demand.
40 transfers in Sydney to Base maintenance due to maintenance on demand.
Qantas were unclear on how 40 Domestic and International LAMEs would be transferred to Base considering redundancies were also occurring there. From today’s meeting we were left under the impression that 188-198 LAMEs will be made redundant in total.
The ALAEA then asked Gavin Harris how long he had known about the additional redundancies that had not been signalled through the course of EA meetings and he assured us that the first he knew about the changes to Base Maintenance was last Friday. On that basis we advised Qantas that we have been meeting with the wrong people regarding our next Agreement, particularly the job security clauses. We requested that people who do know what the plans of the company are attend the meeting including Alan Joyce. Qantas advised us that Alan Joyce was unavailable.
The ALAEA advised management that we thought it a non-productive exercise continuing without Alan or persons who are aware of what the company have planned over the life of the Agreement in attendance. Please prepare for notifications of Protected Industrial Actions over the coming days.
STEVE PURVINAS
Federal Secretary