Professor, your arguments would be empirically verifiable if the Qantas Group operated a straight forward transparent airline business. It does not.
It is a complex multi-jurisdictional aviation franchise conglomerate. Its accounts are not transparent. It is able to shield its offshore entities and legally allocate costs & revenues as it see fit under Australian Accounting Standards Segment reporting.
Employee costs are
NOT one of the few controllable costs
in the Qantas business,
unlike most other airline businesses. Other controllable costs
are the other offshore businesses themselves. These are very large. How big is not quantifiable due to the lack of transparent, but they are a massive burden to the business.
From a pilots point of view, there is a problem with pilot labor costs. The longhaul award has accreted many inefficiencies over time, through a process of negotiation. These inefficiencies are magnified with fleet reductions. Qantas was offered a genuine opportunity in 2010/11 to negotiate, it chose not to. I also note you have scrupulously avoided this topic in your arguments
The rise in the AUD has also caused a massive increase in
$US dollar denominated salary benchmarks.
There has been a sustained media campaign to paint the root cause of the Qantas financial problems as the workers. If it were a simple airline business in this position, I would agree with these arguments. It is not.
There has been a decade of offshore business growth, with two years of profits,
SIN $2.5 (2014) and $2.1 million (2013) for Jetstar Asia, that's it. Losses in Vietnam, Hong Kong & Japan. How much? There are no accounts produced to allow us to see.
What would the Qantas financial position look like
without the massive offshore expansion over the decade? You haven't mentioned this case.
There is simply no way to compare Qantas to other airlines,
it is not a simple airline business, it is a complex piece of opaque financial engineering.
Anyone reading through this thread would note your continued avoidance of such topics and wonder why. Your arguments could be seen as cherry picking data to suit a particular ideology, rather than seeking to ascertain the truth. Are you a truth seeker or an ideologue? The longer you dance around the issue, the more you look like the latter.