More for Gaunty
Firstly, thank you for your personal and professional background. It sheds some light on your perspective in your original comments which didn’t have a lot of detail. Congratulations on your life choices, your family success, that you are self made and on your uncommon longevity in this fickle industry.
I have a few points in response to your original post.
The way I read it you were proposing putting Qantas into Voluntary Administration as a business strategy because excessive labour costs are its primary problem/failure.
What Qf needs does not need, in my humble opinion, is short sighted administrators with limited airline management experience and whose primary goal is most often no more than to keep the business afloat long enough to salvage what they can for the creditors and of course their own hefty fees. Their roles too often morph into that of liquidators.
This would be simply no improvement on the standard of management that the company (here I mean the people in the company and the shareholders as these two groups are really the company) has already agonized under for well over a decade and with no better outcomes. The company simply needs sound and genuine management to thrive, it does not even need outstanding management.
Your reference to ‘restructuring’ and ‘cancers’ appears to apply only to labour costs when this is but a part of the company’s overall operating costs. Couldn’t help but wonder why you singled this out alone given the tonnage of posts regarding the multi-million $ inefficiencies in so many other areas being flagged in this thread alone.
Labour costs, even at the claimed 24% (a figure I very much doubt given the significant outsourcing and casualisation that has taken place in the last ten years) pales into insignificance when compared with the countless screwups in investment decisions, route juggling, airframe selection and fit out, short sighted operational and planning directives which save cents this month and cost dollars over future months, incredibly inefficient rostering (especially in SH but by no means limited to), the many abysmal, failed marketing strategies (SMH today), inconsistent and destructive attempts to develop business partnerships (HIAL’s post above), etc etc bloody etc.
Hence my tongue in cheek reference to the working poor after your ‘but at least with a job’ comment where especially in the likes of the US you have millions of ‘employed’ people working long hours on criminally low hourly rates (or on tips alone) which never quite allow them to save or invest their way out of living near the poverty line. I never want to see that here for the sake of your grandchildren and mine.
I was pleased to hear in your last post that you treat your staff considerately and respectfully. (I was also pleased to hear that you broadened the area of blame a little further than in your original post too). I suspect that this fact has been a real contributor to your business longevity. Sadly too few employers, unlike you, acknowledge or have acknowledged this, like the current and recent Boards and CEOs.
In order to attempt to offset this power imbalace unionism developed historically and not unexpectedly. I recall my grandfather telling me about how he and his co workers fought vehemently to move on from the 48 hour week to gain the 8 hour day - "8 hours labor, 8 hours recreation, 8 hours rest". Just a couple of years ago a mate of mine at the time who had his own small aviation company was bemoaning the audacity of the powers that be who introduced the 38 hour week and its impact on his bottom line. My mind immediately went back to my grandfather’s stories. Some things just don’t change.
Of course there are many examples of unionism going too far and this is simply not acceptable. I have to say that these days it is relatively rare thanks to appropriate legislation. If the best that gentlemen journalist from WA can do to slight the LH EBA by making out that pilots demand to be supplied with three vegetables in their meals then that says something about just how desperate and unable to find supporting examples he was.
By and large QF employees would willingly negotiate down their salaries and conditions within reason, in return for a little goodwill and a little reassurance about the future of the company. They have seen neither of these on the table for many years, even if three veges may be there.
Sorry to be a little longwinded but I thought you were entitled to understand where I was coming from.
LD
Last edited by LookinDown; 1st Mar 2014 at 10:05.