An open letter to senior management
An open letter to Senior Management,
As labour constitutes 30% of your operating costs, it is appropriate you focus attention reducing and containing it. Airlines maintain teams of people and highly paid consultants who spend every waking hour in the pursuit of lower labour unit cost. Achieved through an oversupply of pilots you created: IR utopia. Upon which was built an industry designed to generate conflict, tension and anxiety in employees whilst claiming publicly you wanted productivity!
You aimed for fear, uncertainty and doubt. You got it. For decades the model held sway. At its apex sat Michael O’Leary and Ryan air a model replicated the world over. An oversupply of pilots eagerly looking skyward hooked on aviation. This was something to be abused and laughed at, but pilots were not in on the joke.
In Australia the IR sorcerers built an empire on those jokes and along the way a personal fortune. They devised ways to put pilot against pilot, undercut and divide. It worked brilliantly in Australia as it did in Europe. US Airlines since 1978 used Chapter 11 to restructure terms and conditions, Australian practitioners rolled out the playbook embracing the dark art of IR. Australia had no such corporate provisions, but nonetheless the international division that was somehow in ‘terminal decline’ in 2011, has just recorded another profit of near record magnitude. Amazing when it is considered that it was achieved on the same contracts with the same fleet that only four years ago that had management asking for AUD$3 billion in taxpayer handouts!
A question lingers of that year unanswered: Why was Lucinda Holdforth gagged by a court from releasing her memories of the supposed ‘spontaneous decision’ made with no help from IR lawyers on a Saturday morning in October 2011? Grounding the entire international fleet (and the domestic workforce not taking industrial action-yet excluding Jetconnect and Jetstar) you executed. You broke the implicit agreement between employees and their employer: Trust is sacred, you don’t count it, you can’t measure it but you sure know when it is absent. Your workforce loves the company, but you confuse it with admiration for your management model, many people delude themselves and Net Promoter Scores tell you nothing. To the teams of accountants if you cant assign a cost or value it means nothing.
So you have divided pilots, you have ‘competitive tension’ across the group. You have contractors flying company tails, you dangle new jets to another subsidiary and you wish to bring in another group of pilots to fly Australian registered aircraft on lesser conditions. You haven’t learned. Perhaps you ought to read Winnie the Pooh: Going to the hunny (sic) pot one too many times.
You have declining supply driven by demographics; you have the poster boy O’Leary on bended knee to his pilots. Kudos to you convincing a generation of prospective pilots that the lesser terms and conditions are all there is. They respond as rational people do; they never enter the industry.
So as you have started fights with your contractors, it is hurting your customers again. A cycle of wash, rinse and repeat, is that all you got? It worked for decades, but lack of trust lingers. You have done it to Qantas pilots; you did it to Jetconnect pilots, to Qantas link pilots and even the contractors at Cobham. Pilots learned from 2011.They do not trust you. Your model is breaking down. As Christmas approaches, there is a question you ought to ask yourself: Have you got a pilot’s licence?
Last edited by Rated De; 25th Nov 2017 at 06:59.
Reason: typo!