There is also the unquantifiable positive effect on society as a whole when there are good workplace relationships. When people are respected, treated fairly, paid reasonably and given opportunities to contribute skill, knowledge, experience and value........that stuff is priceless and gets taken home and spread around in society.
Our societies have been rendered obsolete it is an economy now! What an economy fails to understand at its core, is the connection between people.
Some airlines realise it, some businesses understand that 'my income is your revenue' and so on.
Airlines remain for the foreseeable future 'people businesses' where they are a community. Airline managers as modern MBA graduates can't see the 'community' of an organisation. Instead it is divided into its segments where accountants can drill down and unit costs be assessed (and lowered). Having worked with many of these types I can attest, they look at a shoe factory as they would an airline; people are only ever counted as units of labour cost. Linking it all together where the collective is greater than the sum of the parts is really the limitation of their skill set; a scotoma.
Airlines were built by people with vision, never by accountants, who after all simply count what has already happened and project the future from the past. It is an important discipline of course, but in the modern corporation holds in my opinion, way too much power. Accounting is by definition assessing a businesses' future whilst driving forwards, focused on the rear vision mirror (apologies to Paul Keating) Tied together with HR/IR and you begin to comprehend the problem and task.
Alan Joyce given his humble Irish background, had a real opportunity to take Qantas in a different direction; away from conflict and adversarial relations with its staff. Candidly with Leigh Clifford even if he wanted to it would have been a difficult task.
It will be left to someone who remembers their history and values people that will turn it around. Part of that herculean task is dismantling well entrenched interest in the conflict model. That is a task of a big man. Joyce has neither the intent nor appetite, like his mentor at Ryanair, Joyce loves jabs at pilots
Trust Mr O’Leary to add fuel to that inferno with his accusation that some pilots were being “precious about themselves” and “full of their own self-importance”. Not to mention jabs at the amount of hours they have to work.
In 2011 as it suited his (Joyce's) narrative, pilots wanted first class travel, massages and were kamikazes.
Can O'Leary or Joyce change?
Perhaps best summed up by the Independent:
Time for the mutinous pilots to book the gains they’ve made and pipe down?
If I were in their shoes I would at this point ask myself whether leopards ever really change their spots.
Though the pursuit of this adversarial strategy handed management gains over their pilots for decades, this is now changing. As O'Leary continually increases the flight cancellation count and writes confessional letters of apology to the pilots at Ryanair, they have, through their own IR/HR structure killed off the unlimited supply of pilots their model necessitated.
That is amusing to watch and Australian pilots ought remember that unless Australia is somehow divinely different it will get there too! The pilots at Cobham ought remember that revenue for an airline approaches zero if no flights get to destination, and also remember that whilst pilots are a very important part of an airline, there are other operational people that help it all come together....