Qantas announcement today

[TIMA9X]

Just do it - Gillard tells unions and Qantas to negotiate

Just do it - Gillard tells unions and Qantas to negotiate


THE Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, has weighed in on the Qantas dispute, telling all parties to stop talking about negotiating and start doing it.
Her advice wasn't enough to stop hundreds of licensed aircraft maintenance engineers from walking off the job at Sydney Airport yesterday at 4pm for four hours, affecting 7600 domestic and international passengers and causing Qantas to cancel 17 flights and delay another 32.
The walkout came at a peak travel time, and as passengers headed to New Zealand for the Rugby World Cup.


''Qantas and the relevant unions say they want to negotiate this dispute, well I think they should get on and do it,'' Ms Gillard told ABC Radio yesterday.
Some positive signs emerged as the licensed aircraft maintenance engineers union, after a day of talks in Fair Work Australia in Sydney, decided to call off some of their planned strikes.
A four-hour strike at Qantas Engineering next Tuesday in Adelaide and rolling one-hour strikes around the country had been put on hold until Qantas's annual general meeting on October 28, when the need for them would be re-assessed, the union's federal secretary, Steve Purvinas, told a meeting of 300 members late yesterday. The union's ban on overtime remains.
It did little to appease Qantas.


''While we welcome the temporary postponement of some strike action, nothing the union has said today changes the damage that they have done to Qantas, the maintenance of our fleet and to our passengers,'' a Qantas spokeswoman, Olivia Wirth, said.


Qantas will ground five planes on Monday as maintenance banks up, slicing almost 100 flights a week from schedules.
The engineers' union and Qantas are back in talks on Thursday in Melbourne before Fair Work Australia.
Ms Wirth said the airline preferred to negotiate a fair deal with union, rather than have a third-party intervene.


Asked why the government would step into a dispute between a private, publicly-listed company and its employees, Ms Gillard said industrial relations law has long enabled governments to intervene in major industrial disputes.
''That's been a long-standing feature of workplace relations law; we have a comparable section in the Fair Work Act,'' Ms Gillard said.
The opposition accused the government of talking more than acting. The opposition employment spokesman, Eric Abetz, welcomed Ms Gillard's ''belated intervention'' but said the government needed to get more involved. ''Despite all of Labor's talk over the past 24 hours, we have yet to see any concrete plan from the government," he said. ''If Julia Gillard is going to act, then she should just do it.''
Senator Abetz also raised the spectre of an Ansett-style collapse if unions pushed too hard to the point where it seriously damaged Qantas's bottom line.
A failure by Qantas to genuinely negotiate could lead to greater industrial action from pilots, warned the Australian and International Pilots Association vice president, Richard Woodward.


He said the pilots have resisted challenging rostering arrangements, but that could be the next step.''We'd rather negotiate, but negotiation is the art of compromise, and at the moment we've seen zero compromise from the company.''

Read more: Just do it - Gillard tells unions and Qantas to negotiate

OW is way over the top with her words in my view... there is just no need for her to say what she said..... Her sharp words of late is damaging the Qantas brand.. It's almost like sour grapes because her fearless leaders got rapped over the knuckles on the same day...

Here,

QANTAS has received a rap over the knuckles for not allowing a motion of no-confidence in the chief executive, Alan Joyce, and the board to be put to shareholders later this month.


But two influential advisers to some of Qantas's largest institutional investors have recommended shareholders vote in favour of the airline's pay card for the senior executives.


The voting advice from CGI Glass Lewis and ISS Governance takes the wind out of the sails of attempts by unions and the Australian Shareholders' Association for investors to vote against the pay packages for Mr Joyce and the rest of his senior management team.


Although CGI has urged a vote in favour of all of the resolutions at Qantas's annual general meeting on October 28, it has taken exception to the company not allowing a motion of no confidence in Mr Joyce, the company's chairman, Leigh Clifford, and the rest of the board to be put to shareholders.

Qantas objected to the motion from a group of more than 100 shareholders to be aired on the basis that it would have ''no operative effect'' under company law. But the proxy adviser said Qantas had not given a good reason for not allowing it to be put to the meeting, adding that ''we do not agree that having 'no operative effect' is adequate justification''.


The chance for shareholders to have proposals raised at annual general meetings was a core right and ''any challenge to or derogation from that right by boards is a serious matter,'' CGI said.


''It is not for the chairman and his co-directors, who are the agents of shareholders, to offer their principals a halfway house to the Australian statutory shareholder right.''


Despite the government threatening to intervene in Qantas's damaging industrial relations dispute, unions are ramping up their action before the company's annual general meeting.


Their attacks on Mr Joyce's pay has been central to their campaign for job security clauses to be inserted into new enterprise agreements. His total pay this year rose from $2.92 million to $5 million, due largely to share-based payments increasing from $964,000 to $2.72 million.
But in urging a vote in favour, CGI said Qantas had aligned executive pay and the company's performance over the past year and Mr Joyce's pay was in line with his peers.


The proxy adviser described the accounting-based reporting of share-based pay for Mr Joyce as ''misleading'' because, while his reported pay was $5 million, ''his actual remuneration'' was just over $3 million. ISS has also urged investors to vote in favour of Qantas's remuneration report partly because it believed the hurdles for long-term incentives for Qantas executives were demanding.

Read more: Advisers knock down Qantas protest vote

but AJ and LC still get away with it..