and they will have to resign from OF and take up employment with QDS losing 4 years of earned entitlements and with reduced benefits. Plus the work at Richmond is only contracted for another 16 months then they will be out the door again if QDS don’t win the contract. :ouch:

heard today their is a change to the ex apprentices sections at least 3 to go to cabo's syd

No. But at least they do know what they're doing.

I wuzzgonna post a photo of the engine on a Chinese airliner which had the fan locked so it wouldn't windmill during an engine-out ferry flight. It was locked with a seat-belt extension strapped through between the fan-blades by some enterprising Chinese "engineer". Nice!!!

But I couldn't find the photo.....

Make sure you do a good pre-flight and have a look in the intakes, guys....... :rolleyes:

So what's happening with the D check? Is it going offshore and is the big announcement still imminent?

We suspect an announcement around the 16th of feb.
The general manager of H/M has said that "The D check was postponed to maintain the integrity of the Line."
What ever he means by that is anyones guess.
One indicator though is that the Lean Sigma team is feverishly working on h245 to streamline sA checks.
Indications from the man in charge of outsourcing and insourcing are that to Lean Sigma the Hangar for a D check would be overkill. And that is what they would be doing if D checks were in the long term plan.
What would be nice is if the management team came down and told us the truth.
The truth would involve what the options for Lne 1 etc are. Not the overall summary ie No change (not going to happen), All Outsourced (on the table),
Major changes in the structure and operations in H/M (Also on table), .... but what the Major changes would involve. you know the sort of thing, they could come down and say "Well fellas if we decide to keep Sydney Line 1 open we will be going to 5 day week about shift and running overlapping sA cecks and we will have to reduce staff by x amount"
or "If we keep Line 1 open we will be doing ....whatever"
This would at least give people some idea of how to plan for their futures.
Should they ask their wives to start looking for work and to book child care places or will that not be required, should they sign up for weekend sport, should they they sign that house contract or lease that car should they start to retrain , do some computer courses etc,etc,etc.
This secrecy is obscene. The staff are being used by Geoff Dixon as political ammunition in an attempt to keep Singapore airlines off the LAX route.
Darth Dixon is saying to Little Johnny "if you open it up we will have to sackk australian workers and we are going to blame you"
in reality whether or not Singapore get in will make no difference to Dixon....All he sees is profit and if he has identified a way to increase it he will do it no matter what.
I just wish our managers would have the balls to show us some respect.

Rumour floating around today up in Brissy is that there was some kind of unofficial announcement today that Sydney Heavy is to shutdown. Rang a few guys who were on today and they cannot confirm. Where has this rumour come from??

I heard that one too. Apparently it was almost an announcement.

Yesterday the the whole gang from Syd HM management team came down frm above to tell us all that there was nothing to tell us. The impression was 200-300 job losses, moving to sA checks and a few C checks on an 8 hour roster "that would need negotiating"(read critical path crew same as brisbane). There would be no extended hour roster in the future.
This will be the most likely scenario if we are still in existance.
For redundancies, first voluntary and then "last on - first off".
They mentioned that all the information from Heavy Maintenance that had to be used to justify our existance was sent to consultants.
Does anyone know who they are and what their track record has been?
But for words of reassurance from the Snr Manager "The sun will still rise tomorrow, so don't go slashing your wrists yet"

Why do I not like the sound of that one little bit?
And does anyone know the definition of a consultant?

You only live twice. Once when
you're born. Once when
you've looked death in the face.

I keep thinking back to the Price waterhouse debacle of the mid 90's.
Qf paid them a huge amount of money to come and rearrange the way we do things and then as soon as they left we had the inconvienience of having to put everything back in it's proper place so that the place would run.

Did they offer any option other than redundancy like redeployment or a engineering wide vr followed by redeployment. doesnt last in first out run against their normal age, skills, rules
the unions seem to be locked out of all this
hang in there guys prepare for the worst and hope for the best

The toe cutter made it quite clear that redundancies and redeployment were not transferrable amongst the "business units".
He said that when it came to compulsary rdundancies that the unions would have to sort out who went but that it was usually last on first off.
This is indeed the principles that the LAMES are employed under as per their eba. (eba iv) Last on first off and then those nearing retirement age.
ie New blokes and Old blokes.
Then they can sort out the rest.
It is obvious however that the company has no intention in sticking to the EBA when it comes to the clause about doing everything possible to avoid redundancies in consultation with the unions.
Because this would mean that they have already consulted with union representaives and discussed the plans for the future and asked for some input. If this has happened we haven't heard about it.
In fact all the Alaea has done about it is asked Keith Clarke what he knows and accepted that he knows nothing.
There has been no persual of the ones that would know ie Cox and Dixon and O'Donnel and the mob of consultants.
I have not seen one notice from the Fed Exec about our current crisis.

I hope for all your sakes the consultants know something of the industry!

also towards the end of that meeting last night our manager also mentioned that they will have to outsource some work at the end of the year due to the heavy work load(to many aircraft and not enough engineers to fix them),figure that one out

I can see Dixon's logic - reduce staff to save cost, followed by too much work, therefore outsource to low cost option. It is moving off shore by stealth.

What a shocker this company is.

you beat me to the post about our wee meeting QFCainer.

What disappointed me, was the lack of questions surrounding the contractors. Sydney/Melbourne guys..... The nose that mis-manages our facility believes that you are too expensive to bring up on secondment. Apparently, $70/hr+ contractors are cheaper. The unions have been fighting this issue with management for some time now.... but the memebers today virtually said nothing about it in the wee meeting. Maybe nobody cares?

There are plenty of experienced guys down south ready to go. They dont need Qantasising before they start... It would be in BHMs best interest to bring people up on secondments..... it may give people a taste of Brissy and may persuade some more people to move up.

Then again... maybe it will just turn them off.

Interesting results from our staff survey conducted late November. On the question of where staff believe areas of improvements are required, staff answered....

Management 22%
Communication 17%
Resources 14%
Rewads/Recognition 12%
Training/Career Path 11%
Morale 11%
Staffing levels 7%
Shift Patterns 7%

If I was the nose & Co, I would be embarrassed.
Perhapps a little off topic.... but may help those from Sydney/Melbourne if they are forced to consider a transfer

Well that just stuffed up the only advice that the ALAEA has given blokes from Sydney. When asked what are we doing about all the redundancies about to happen last round Gary N from the office told the guy on the phone to move to Brisbane. I wonder what they'll come up with this time?

this is the best the ALAEA can come up with,move to Brisbane if you want to keep your job ,what IR gaints we have looking after our interests.
Biggest waste of $500 per year i have

I'm sorry to have to see this. When you do a reorganisation or cutting, you either do it quick and dirty (as in "don't come Monday"), or you do it slow and "clean" (by clean,I mean voluntary redundancies, retraining, lots of consultation, timetables, newsletters, etc. etc. all done over a few years.)

The one thing you don't do is a "slow and dirty" change - which is what QF appears to be doing because it maximises the pain.