Staff at Forstaff played nice and took no action against Qantas 100 are gone but not one Qantas Staff member amongst them Tullamarine took action 400 are going so what's the solution your screwed either way...
If every worker in the country united against every lousy/incompetent company management when they screwed up, went broke and took peoples' jobs with them, we would have a different IR landscape.
However, that never happens.
Workers, united will never be defeated. The 'united' part is the difficult bit, though. Most of the time people are happy to nod along sagely, saying 'that's dreadful' (or sometimes 'those jumped up snots deserved it, never gave
me a job / us the contract / equal access to the favoured carparks'
) when it doesn't directly affect their employment. Meanwhile, conditions get eroded and standards quietly drop. If anyone wants to argue about the standards I have two words: Toll and Menzies.
When it's their own job? Different story altogether. Of course by then, it's too little too late.
On 'professional.'
The word implies a partnership amongst equals, where professional managers and professional pilots/LAMES/whatevers work together to achieve great things and shareholder value. It's a sunshine-lollipop word, like 'Australian', 'Mum', 'integrity' or 'values'.
These shiny words are regularly used by the unscrupulous to conjure up favourable images in the minds of honest people and make them susceptible to being
ed over. Words have power, just ask the advertisers...
That's why it gets trotted out regularly by lousy managers when they're worried that the staff are onto them. They don't actually think the staff are professional (more a bunch of talking gorillas) but they know the staff consider themselves to be thus, so it's a useful emotive point in a punch up. Often, management using the word is a token ego-stroke to the workers that can make them nominally happy, while distracting them from the real problems. IME it's a word to watch out for.
BTW this is not aimed at HTH's commentary or his use of the word, but at Qantas and other lousy companies. They love 'professionals'.
They're so easy to separate from the herd of nasty 'workers'.
