Politicians and more particularly the general public need to be confronted with the fact that there is more to this industrial unrest than meets the eye. Australian workers are not permitted to take industrial action when they are presented with daily evidence that the board and management are either incompetent or are deliberately trying to destroy Qantas, but they can withdraw their labour over a modest single digit pay claim when the company will not engage in meaningful talks while the CEO feels that he is entitled to a 71% increase. Unfortunately, all the general public see in this is pay claims and inconvenience to travellers. They have no appreciation of the underlying anger felt by the staff while their leaders set about dismantling a proud national icon and turning it into something loathsome. It's not about dinosaurs being unwilling to accept change. It's all about long term employees who are trustees of the corporate memory watching short term poseurs ignoring hard earned lessons of the past. In carelessly discarding things that made Qantas special they have lost sight of the concept of doing the job properly. They need to be reminded that profit through mediocrity is failure.
If indeed Qantas international is underperforming, that’s not the fault of the staff. That is the fault of management who continue to be rewarded for their failures. If indeed Qantas international is underperforming, it may have more to do with the fact that many managers came from domestic operations and never really grasped the fact that international operations are different. Because they are out of their depth they adopt the “ignore it and it might go away” approach. The tragedy is that their wish is being fulfilled.
Clearly the penny hasn’t dropped for the majority of the general public that there has to be more to this if three of the major unions are in dispute with the company. This is understandable when the public get their “facts” from full-page Qantas ads and a compliant media. This imbalance needs to be corrected. Could not the unions combine their resources to fund newspaper ads to counter Qantas propaganda? This would also serve to present a united front and mitigate any suggestion that it is all about a pay grab.
Pray for Qantas.