I know I would be hanged for suggesting this, but don't you all in bexley think its time to offer Qantas a new EBA in line with industry standards in pay, super and entitlements?
I would love to be on the higher end of the LAME scale with bolt on payments but we are pricing Qantas LAMEs out of the business. This is my suggestion to improving cost savings for the airline and possibly saving the lives and jobs of hundreds.
Hey your suggestion is absolutely worth making here so I can explain this. I think Sunfish did in a very brief comment but I will talk about history a bit.
Nothing you can do will mollify management, you could even work for free and it would make no difference. They want unchallenged power and will stop at nothing to get it.
For a start the Qantas LAME wage structure does provide higher wages for those at the top end. Down the bottom though and in the middle levels you are behind the other LAME employment rates. Virgin are at about $120k. A Qantas Line LAME would take at least 16 years to earn that amount. Even places like Alliance have comparable wages to Qantas. The Qantas wages are not the problem.
If you thought it was the overall price for HM I say no also. The 744 reconfig went out to tender. Haeko bid $195M, Avalon bid $200M. We were 2.5% dearer but by the time you fly the aircraft up there, guess what. Each year they kept setting Mel HM impossible performance targets so they could tell them they were too expensive. Each year the blokes met the targets. In the end they stopped setting targets because they just wanted to shut the place down for the reasons Sunfish describes.
If you think we as a union should try and work with the company I would suggest we don't. It has all been tried before. We had union leadership who were for many years a little more conservative (some will say a lot). During this period of co-operation Syd HM was closed.
Back to your original "take a hit now to save jobs" concept. Our friends across the big pond at American Airlines did this. They took a 30% wage cut not long ago. the company then deliberately declared chapter 11 (by ensuring they ordered and paid for far more aircraft than they need to make sure they lost money) and want further wage cuts. For management it is never enough.