Coolbanana:
Whatever HAECO or SIAEC pay their engineers is irrelevant in this discussion.
What matters to QF is how much they will charge them for the manpower they supply, be it per hour or as part of an inclusive check price.
What matters even more is how much they'll charge once they know QF have no onshore alternative.
Ho! Ho! Ho! Banana you have read my mind, but wait! There are more games that are yet to be played.
Whoever is in charge of outsourcing is no doubt totally schmoozed, wined, dined, lubricated fondled and provided with whatever they need by HAECO, legal or not, but there are now Three more steps to go to encompass the full capture of Qantas by its outsource company.
1. You gently but insistently suggest to the target, be it Alan Joyce, a Board member or the senior manager responsible that the project is tied around their neck and their success (and by implication their career prospects) depends not only on the projects success
but the project being seen to be a success by the Board and senior management..
2. Once that thought is firmly implanted, the target then, with a little prodding, decides that
the project must be protected at all costs from any adverse criticism from anywhere. Once that subvocal decision is made, the outsourcer has a new staff member - the Qantas manager who sponsored the project!
Of course our objective in doing this is to lobotomise/paralyse Qantas while we suck the life out of it. To do this we remove anyone in Qantas with the technical skills to analyse our performance, either technically or financially, so that no one can determine if we are providing value for money. We do this by:
(a) DIscovering who the technical and financial leaders are who could analyse our work and its costs. We hire the best and brightest of them ourselves (we make them relationship managers don't we? After all they know Qantas). With the willing help of the sponsoring Qantas manager whose neck is on the line, we suggest that Qantas fire the technical staff who might criticise our work,don't like us, or might blow the whistle.
(b) Offering to provide a full suite of "performance reports" every month for the Board and Senior management - of course our analysis and presentation is always designed to show us in the best possible light. Qantas of course fires the in house bean counters who once did this.
3. We are now in the happy end state to which all good outsource providers aspire:
We have total control of the Qantas technical agenda because there is no one left in the company with the technical background to stand up to us. Any who try are fired by Qantas management at our request. We can use this ability to maximise profits.
Our client does not have the faintest idea if they are receiving value for money. We have removed anyone who has the ability to perform forensic financial analysis of maintenance and overhaul costs. Any who try are fired by Qantas management at our request.
Should Qantas become a little anxious about this situation, we grab the management by the balls and squeeze, hard. We make it as difficult as possible to switch to a new outsourcing supplier. We ensure that any attempt to remove us is going to be career suicide for our Qantas management sponsor, we can do this by selective leaking to the media about the real costs of our services. If we are a teeny bit lucky, we also have a **** file on the Qantas management sponsor, maybe they liked underage chinese girls or been a bit free with the expense account? We know all about that and file it. We remind Qantas that as they have no technical expertise in aircraft maintenance any more, they will have to bear the costs of re-establishing technical expertise before they are even capable of assessing another supplier.
A company I worked for did exactly this to a very large Melbourne based undertaking. Of course once they worked out what we had done to them, they had the balls to hire a whole new technical team and gradually pry themselves free of our clutches. Pity that Qantas doesn't have the balls.