A change was on the way the moment the baby boom was born.
That generation has to retire and eventually cease to exist. There never has been sufficient people to replace the biggest generation in history.
and how some airlines treat their staff, especially at one often mentioned turbo prop regional in Oz, I’m more than happy to stay a lowly instructor…………sorry airlines in Australia, I’m just not interested any more.
It comes down to
respect, after all companies exist as a collective because together people accomplish more than we ever can alone. With hordes of HR (human remains) dictating policy in hiring and 'talent management' and infecting organsiations with a never ending desire to drive down unit cost, they exist not to further the collective effort, but rather their own empire's survival.
With Qantas' Joyce pulling a measly AUD$24.8 million for a group revenue that has gone down in real terms, as did luckily the fuel price, the division of the pie has been away from employees to 'executives' and their minions.Not just in aviation.
This paradigm shift (supply shortage) has been a long time coming and put simply
with such a huge cost to learn to fly, an extended period of time until employable by airlines, a continued erosion or work life balance and less compensation for losing that balance, people make rational decisions are choose something else. If memory serves correctly when the HECS fees rose exponentially for Veterinary science in Australian universities, enrollments plummeted.
Management adversarial IT models have served their proponents well. Dismantling the apparatus of HR/IT will take time, but O'Leary was a pioneer of the adversarial model and is trumpeted by airline managers the world over. Australia's Jetstar model was set up with precisely that intent in mind: Minimum union oversight, adversarial, not 'accommodative' relations and practices designed to lower labour unit cost. CAO limits are targets, all in the name of productivity.
As I understand it, OLeary told shareholders he can take leave off pilots to keep things flying as the employment relationship allows him to do it.I wonder whether his pilots will be accommodate more adversarial conduct?
Air New Zealand under Rob Fyfe, Gordon Bethune at Continental and of course Southwest Airlines they don't behave towards people as this model dictates, their unit labour cost may be higher, but their group productivity is far higher. Treating people with respect does far more than accountants can ever count.
