Heading for industrial turbulence?

The Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association (ALAEA) has thus far fought a damaging, although regrettably misleading campaign against Qantas’s practice of sending maintenance offshore, which Qantas has struggled to quell.

In fact it was left to SIA Engineering Company (SIAEC) to weigh into the debate to put the “staples” into perspective and in doing so raising the question of exactly who did use staples to secure wiring on two 747-400s.

SIAEC was furious over the assertions that maintenance done at its facility was substandard.

In its statement it said: “The allegations that the ALAEA has made to date concerning our processes and practices are baseless and blatantly disregard the findings of the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) of Australia, which has audited SIAEC on several recent occasions. ” It added that SIAEC “was surprised that ALAEA had failed to tell the public and media that the alleged maintenance discrepancies were discovered some 10 months after the aircraft have left SIAEC’s facilities and in an area of the aircraft in which our personnel were not working. ” SIAEC added: “They [ALAEA] are shamefully using an industrial campaign against Qantas to illegitimately cause safety concerns to the travelling public. ” However, regardless of the rights and wrongs of the issue it is clearly a battle that is not going to disappear, and Qantas’s record result will only inflame the situation with unions getting tired of the same old cost-cutting rhetoric.

Seething is possibly a good way to describe the mood amongst Qantas casual flight attendants, who are typically given the worst rosters of just three to fours hours at a time and get no benefits such as staff travel.

Sources have told Contrails “that they [flight attendants] plan some spectacular action. ” Slightly removed from Qantas, National Jet Systems, which operates QantasLink 717s, faces disruption from its pilot ranks over pay and conditions, with NJS striving to bond pilots despite the pilots paying for their own 717 endorsements.

One of the arguments touted by the pilots on the 717s is that all the unskilled workers they are carrying into Western Australia’s resource rich north are earning far more money than they are paid.

NJS pilots claim their starting salaries are in the $70,000 range, yet fly-in/fly-out dish washers are earning $100,000! Peter Somerville of the Australian and International Pilots Association (AIPA) put the situation into perspective after the failed Airline Partners Australia bid when he said: “We’ve had years of Geoff Dixon talking crisis, talking problems, talking cost-cutting, talking sacrifice.

We all understand that, but now after the APA bid and the amount of information that’s come out, it’s time that part of the benefit was shared with the staff. ” Qantas is of course facing tougher and leaner competition which means greater pressure on yields and thus a greater need to increase efficiency.

The challenge or dilemma for management is that record profits don’t make for a good background for discussions on increasing productivity or limiting pay rises.

And these rumblings come against a backdrop of what appears to be strained relationships between staff and Qantas’s middle management.

Recently Qantas lost on appeal the dismissal case against cabin supervisor Philip Woodward-Brown (57) for being caught with some chocolate-covered macadamia nuts in his pocket.

The Australian Industrial Relations Commission senior deputy president, Lea Drake, was quoted as stating that “the breaches could have been dealt with in ways other than dismissal. ” Woodward-Brown, with 32 years of unblemished service, was the third Qantas employee in just 18 months to be sacked for breaches of policy and then reinstated following a commission hearing.

Time has now come for new innovative strategies to reward airline staff in the good times – or the good times will drift to airlines which are more innovative and perhaps more forgiving of human frailties.