AJ does not act in isolation.
To think he is solely responsible would be naive.
I have given this a great deal of thought. Whilst I am certainly not inside the Qantas tent, I offer an opinion, but probably a plausible view of many of the functions and offer an alternative path.
I would consider board composition to be a valuable insight into intentions. The Qantas board has more than a smattering of Freehills lawyers. Those lawyers are industrial in posture and advise many of the same corporates. Chris Corrigan was a great mate of James Strong at Qantas. Leigh Clifford knows rocks pretty well, is fiercely anti-union. Freehills advised Chris Corrigan at Patrick Stevedores. Correlation is not causation, Maybe a new Fair Work Act had provisions that changed the balance between labour and management, perhaps a plan was in the making when Mr Joyce got the nod to re-establish the status quo promised under Work Choices.
Mr Joyce possesses mathematical prowess, but that discipline is not necessarily optimal where dynamic complexity of airlines render models obsolete. Mr Joyce may be better suited to assessing decisions. I recall an interview where Leigh Clifford commented that Mr Joyce knew the’
cost down to a paperclip’ whilst that is an impressive talent and to someone with little aviation knowledge, like Mr Clifford may seem a fantastic choice, it ignores the fact that airlines are dynamic and models are just approximations.
I suspect that in 2011, with three big enterprise agreements up for negotiation, the stage was set. Qantas International was said to be in ‘terminal decline’ Lucinda Holdforth worked on her speech and the management worked on Project ‘whatever’ setting the scene with Freehills. Salivating at the prospect to test the Fair Work Act . Clipping the wings of Qantas international would mean stepping around the Sale Act, and growing Jetstar was a pet project for Mr Joyce. How would Qantas convince the community to accept JQ at the expense of Qantas, if Qantas wasn’t terminal?
To my mind, the supposition that Mr Joyce organised it all on a Saturday morning is as implausible as Tesla living on Mars in 2020. Why was Ms Holdforth gagged? Did she actually work on that speech for months?
I consider the role of unions to be partners of the company with which they work. I do not know of one airline pilot that wished to leave an airline they proudly worked for; most airline pilots want only one employer. I would hazard a guess that most engineers, starting as apprentices would feel the same; the ones I know do. Are Qantas unions destructive? I am not persuaded
specialist unions are. Whether they are well led is another question. The trick for labour unions is to abandon their world view. Ironically the same challenge Qantas faces.
As detailed in the Southwest Way, one manager said
‘we have our disagreements, but ultimately we realise the unions are invested in the business, so we remember to disagree but we have an empathy and maintain respect.’ (I paraphrase) This view is simply not supported by Qantas. There is too much adversarial infrastructure supporting the posture for that to ever change. Sadly those who promote the conflict and distrust also profit from it. Mr Joyce from humble beginnings in Ireland at the edge of the tenements would have understood the value of community, Survival in those times depended upon it. People needed people and airlines are a big team sport. Former Qantas Chief Pilot Chris Manning alluded to this opportunity when quoted by Matt O’Sullivan in the lightweight read ‘May Day’ Mr Joyce is a very wealthy man, and he chose another path. The environment at Ryanair secures lower labour unit cost but also much lower productivity than Southwest.
Qantas may count the grounding and lockout, the pay freezes and job losses as
efficiency dividend, I guess if you look at a spread sheet, people aren’t important. The bag of tricks is empty.
Mr Joyce and Clifford should have left when they broke the employees, that trust once spent isn’t recovered.
What could have been done is an easy question: We have 20/20 hindsight. However recognising the role of staff, which is beyond money, required a CEO to abandon that adversarial staff model. It needed a big man and to my mind it isn’t Mr Joyce. With board acquiesce, or directive he did what he did. On the way he got wealthy, but I would expect most of the staff have no desire to embrace him like they did Herb Kelleher. Had the 14 788 came to Qantas as originally proposed, instead of JQ, mainline domestic would have had a great product differential compared to VAH. I see a complimentary role for JQ, many managers in Qantas saw it as the answer. Reducing their fuel included CASK with a long range twin was a no brainer. Yet without it, same contract same fleet and Qantas is ‘transformed’. Insiders got rich along the way. Qantas gets its first 787 when the LN was 615. Hardly forward thinking, game changing or insightful. All pilots know that, but perhaps running an industrial campaign was what Clifford wanted, he got his man with Mr Joyce. It may have been different.