QF94,
It's fair to say that this event is different in some ways to those of the past, but there are similarities.
In the early 80's, profit margins were squeezed badly in a downturn,so Qantas shed a number of engineers, mostly those with 707 licences that could not be deployed elsewhere. Things improved and a couple of years later and those happy to, came back and gained 747 licences to boot.
This repeated itself in the early 90's, with a slightly longer time for re-hiring, and again 2001/2002.
Each time re-hiring occurred when margins improved and capacity cranked up to meet the demand.
Nothing I've seen so far would sway me from believing that this cycle will not change.
Re-hiring is NOT just around the corner, rather, it is at least a few YEARS away and perhaps a little longer, but WILL happen.
The nature of re-hiring is to meet requirements of the time, not numbers made redundant. Historically, there have been many that have left the industry altogether, lost the passion and would never return.
Apprentices graduate and fill the natural attrition as well.
Those that have decided to park themsleves in a money earning job have done so, but still await the farcical "negotiations" between the company and unions to come up with a decision as to what is happening and the numbers. The negotiations seem to be as long and miserable as the federal election campaign we have to put up with for the next six months. All talk and nothing to show for it.
Also AEROMEDIC, if this cycle is as cyclic as you say it is, why are we engineers being inundated with job opportunities outside of QANTAS by both the ALAEA and QANTAS?
These two statements are contradictory. I would hope the second is true.
To make things clearer, the difference this time is that this is a downturn of margins, therefore less PROFIT, even though demand and capacity remain high.
Previously it was a great reduction of demand and therefore overcapacity that had to be reduced resulting in less PROFIT.