Issue 289: Dark Days

Death by a thousand cuts

Qantas boss Alan Joyce likened the three unions’ industrial campaigns that eventually led to the airline’s extraordinary self imposed grounding as “death by a thousand cuts”. From the unions’ point of view, it was ‘industrial campaign 101’ stuff – ratcheting up the heat with a slowly increasing frequency of increasingly disruptive industrial action – the so called ‘slow bake’, with the objective that the pain would eventually become too much and that Qantas would cave in to union demands.

As a strategy that made perfect sense – it worked for the ALAEA last time around in 2008, so why not roll it out again? But, no doubt hardened by that particular experience, Joyce clearly wasn’t going to stand for it. After proactively grounding aircraft and cancelling flights, a fractious annual general meeting where the emotion and anger of Qantas staff and small shareholders was highly visible, but where the airline’s institutional investors clearly had the numbers, proved the catalyst for Joyce’s ‘nuclear option’ – a lockout and grounding of the airline.

What a shocking option that proved to be.