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And here's the other article in the same BRW:
The secret Qantas
By Stuart Washington
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Secret training for strikebreakers in Sydney. Labor-hire firms that pay some staff about $9000 a year. Staff flown in from New Zealand to work cheaply and break strikes. This is not the waterfront, this is Qantas. Until mid-May this year, Qantas was secretly preparing a strikebreaking team at its jet base emergency procedures training area at Sydney Airport. The team was known as 'Day 21ers' because training was needed every 21 days to maintain their qualifications to work on Qantas Boeing 747s for international flights. The Day 21ers were trained as strikebreakers, known to unionists as scabs, in case union negotiations with the international division of the Flight Attendants Association of Australia (FAAA) broke down. The strikebreaking team was maintained in readiness until the enterprise bargaining agreement was certified with the union - meaning it could take no further strike action - on May 22.
The FAAA had already been shown how far Qantas was prepared to go to defeat industrial action. On February 25, the union staged a 14-hour strike. Qantas management mounted an elaborately prepared campaign that drew strikebreaking labor from four separate sources - including Thailand and New Zealand - to defeat the strike. The use of strikebreakers defeats a union's trump card, the ability to withdraw the labor of its members.
Qantas's executive general manager of human resources, Kevin Brown, says Qantas had specifically trained ground staff to work as flight attendants before the strike. He says training of the Day 21ers was continued after the strike because the FAAA threatened further industrial action. 'We took the steps necessary to protect the interests of our customers,' he says. 'We don't maintain, on an ongoing basis, a strikebreaking workforce.'
The national secretary of the international division of the FAAA, Johanna Brem, says, in relation to the continued training of Day 21ers after the strike: 'It's a very heavy-handed tactic.'
The strikebreaking tactics show Qantas's willingness to take a hard line against unions. The efforts to thwart the strike also highlight Qantas's use of overseas labor to cut costs.
There is more of this to come. Qantas has announced that its 100%-owned subsidiary in New Zealand, Jet Connect, will fly to Australia from Wellington and Christchurch using lower-paid New Zealand pilots and flight attendants. The trans-Tasman flights undercut existing routes offered by higher-cost Qantas services, causing disquiet to the Australian and International Pilots Association and the domestic and international divisions of the FAAA.
As Qantas seeks $1 billion in savings and competes with low-cost carriers such as Virgin Blue, chief executive Geoff Dixon is boosting the rhetoric about looking overseas to cut costs. 'Whenever I refer to the possibility that Qantas may need to relocate work offshore, I am greeted with shock. But that is the reality of the aviation industry today,' he said in a speech on June 12. '[Although] we need to be successful in our efforts to secure greater efficiency and cost reductions, we still have to pursue actions in order to remain competitive.'
Linda White, the assistant national secretary of the Australian Services Union (ASU), says her union, which represents about 10,500 Qantas employees, expects Qantas to consider placing key parts of its workforce overseas. She says this could include call centres (about 1200 ASU members), Qantas Holidays (about 500 staff) and Qantas Business Travel (about 300 staff).
Her fears are not unfounded. In 1998, Qantas moved its passenger-revenue accounting business to Fiji, and then to Mexico, resulting in 130 job losses in Australia. White says the union is not aware of any firm proposals to place Qantas work overseas.
The planning for the FAAA strike illustrates Qantas's aggressive stance on union issues. Unionists attribute the strategy variously to Kevin Brown, the executive general manager of operations, David Forsyth; and a consultant, Ian Oldmeadow, who runs an industrial relations consultancy called Oldmeadow Consulting. Oldmeadow was industrial relations manager for Ansett during the 1989 pilots' dispute, which is credited with breaking the pilot union's negotiating power.
Before February 25, Qantas flew in flight attendants from Thailand and New Zealand. They travelled on other airlines to avoid being recognised by Qantas flight attendants. Qantas has hired its overseas staff - about 200 in Thailand and about 70 in New Zealand - through the international labor-hire firm Adecco since late 1998. Wages are about $9000 a year for staff in Thailand and about $24,000 for staff in New Zealand. An Australian Qantas flight attendant's annual wage is about $45,000. Brown says the pay is relative to local market conditions. 'You can't convert anything into Australian dollars,' he says.
Qantas also called in casual flight attendants from the labor-hire company Maurice Alexander Management (MAM) to help break the strike. Maurice Alexander, a former FAAA union official, has about 120 casual flight attendants on his books. He runs his business from a residential address in Hawthorn East, Melbourne. The business is not listed in the telephone book. Qantas also co-opted its staff to take the emergency procedures training necessary to work as a flight
attendant. These included management, and staff from other unions who were on a waiting list to train as flight attendants. The former vice-president of the FAAA Victorian branch, Neil Horneman, says he spoke to a check-in staff member who had been asked to work as a flight attendant without being told he would be strikebreaking.
Qantas's use of strikebreakers negated the union stoppage and allowed the company to exploit rifts between the domestic and international flight attendant unions. The casual flight attendants supplied by MAM are hired within the domestic division, and their casual employment arrangements were used to break the industrial action of the international flight attendants. The FAAA international division's national vice-president, Troy Warner, says: 'Geoff Dixon is playing us off beautifully and standing at the finishing line, clapping us on.'
Qantas's response to the strike exposes the different wage rates and conditions offered to the overseas flight attendants hired through Adecco. When approached by BRW, Adecco managers in Bangkok and Auckland referred inquiries to Qantas public affairs.
Johanna Brem says: 'They get less of everything except they work longer hours.' For example, Australian staff receive a minimum 36-hour break after flying a 14-hour flight. Overseas staff have a minimum 12-hour break after the same flight.
Last year, the New Zealand Flight Attendants and Related Services Association (Farsa) appointed an executive officer, Billy Boreham, to try to unionise the Adecco flight attendants. He says: 'They are working on planes doing exactly the same work as Australian colleagues, on substantially inferior terms and conditions [that are also] substantially inferior to an Air New Zealand equivalent.'
Boreham also says conditions at Jet Connect are unfavorable compared with Air New Zealand's domestic service, Freedom Air. Brown contests the claim that Jet Connect staff are low paid, but says: 'Their rate is lower than some other airlines in New Zealand, that's true.'
Boreham also highlights the difficulties of negotiating union representation for Adecco employees, including being allowed access to the flight attendants only at Adecco's Auckland head office.
'It's a bloody nightmare,' he says. 'They are a shield for Qantas. I could not get physical access to people to even consider the benefits of joining the union. I would stand in the car park at 5.15am in the pitch black and make contact with Adecco flight attendants because I could see them arriving in their cars in Qantas uniforms.'
Qantas is not ruling out anything in terms of future overseas opportunities. Jet Connect and its low-paid staff will soon be flying across the Tasman. Qantas is also maintaining its hard line on unions. Recently, with the approval of the Qantas pilots' union, Qantas employed casual pilots through a labor-hire company, Forstaff Aviation. As seen in the flight attendants' dispute, this could create a pool of strikebreaking labor for future industrial disputes.
Brem says: 'I think there is a lot of distrust between the employees and Qantas, and a lot of bridges have been burnt.'
Boreham is hoping to sign a new deal with Adecco on behalf of the New Zealand flight attendants employed for Qantas through Adecco. He says: 'My honest opinion is it's crap. But it's slightly better crap than what we were on before.'
Diary of a strikebreaker
A Qantas employee has spoken to BRW about his experience as a strikebreaker. He says he was recruited over the phone by a Qantas human resources (HR) staff member in the middle of last year. He worked in two separate strikes last year. He asked that he not be identified.
'The training is secret, even to your local manager. They ask if you are prepared to take on a role or a function during a strike period. We were all trained on multiple tasks: baggage handling, customer services, front counter. They kept using the word 'disruption' and asking for support. I believe they were targeting a lot of people who were non-union members, people stuck in between middle and senior management. If you say no, you were against them. The reason why I went along, it was showing a bit of loyalty to immediate management and the firm.
'[And it was a way to] experience other fields where you don't normally work. It all sounded pretty good at the time.
'When the strike came along, I had a call from someone at Qantas HR indicating who I should report to. [Interstate flights to Sydney and hotel accommodation had been pre-arranged]. They tried not to get local staff to report in local areas. Then you just go and gather in the conference room for a briefing. [We were told] we might be abused, to walk straight, say absolutely nothing, and if anybody was getting abusive or getting close or physical, just call security.
'Then everybody got allocated their task. On our site, fortunately, there weren't any incidents. They sold us in the manner of 'you help us and we will help you'. At that stage, I thought it was something I could help them with. Things have changed since then; there's a lot of restructuring and a lot of redundancies. None of the loyalty is shown back. Now they have turned around, retrenching right across [the company], which also affects the people who supported Qantas. It was actually during the strike period [we] realised how we had been used.'