Qantas plans strike break. Qantas will engage the same strike breaker it used in previous engineers’ strike. Staff are being recruited.

Does Solly want Myer? Apart from a bit of peripheral commentary, it seems no one has cracked on to the real reason Solly Lew has resurrected the career of ex-David Jones boss Mark McInnes. Solly is running his finely tuned ruler over Myer, and now has the right person to drop in to launch yet another strategy for the ailing department store. The fact that Myer is generating less sales that it was when taken over by private equity five years ago, despite the opening of six or seven new stores (that each should be generating $20 million-$40 million a year) is a deeply worrying sign. Another inevitable disappointing announcement will knock the share price and get things started. Stay tuned …

Left friction in Queensland ALP. It’s a sticky spider web in the Queensland Left faction of the ALP at the moment. The latest in the ongoing saga is the Left voting to expel Murray Watt, the Member for Everton, from the faction in retaliation for his support for the unanimous Disputes Tribunal recommendation to expel the outspoken and controversial ETU Secretary Peter Simpson from the party.

ALP assistant state secretary Jackie Trad, a Bligh loyalist, has also been tasked with getting rid of the CFMEU over threats of legal action in the media, as well as the rest of the ETU, both considered the hard-line militants in the party. The talk along George Street is that several senior Left parliamentarians are considering parting ways with the blue-collar militant union wing, fed up with the factional antics of Left unions.

Stacking the shelves: more on home brands. I previously worked for a small company whose main business was supplying house-brand products to Coles and Woolworths, as well as two smaller supermarket chains. The business started with OTC painkillers supplied from India, which were adequate and met TGA quality standards. The company then attempted to expand into other items, such as basic skin products and household cleaning agents. These were generally sourced from China, and of questionable quality.

The tender process required actual product samples from the  intended source, but sometimes the current house-brand product was used. Once samples of creams from China did not arrive in time, so the existing products were purchased from a supermarket, repackaged and sent to the retailer. They failed testing.

Quite often samples of washing machine detergents were blended in the office, creating a product with higher levels of surfactants so it would wash well in the test, but that bore no relationship to what would actually be supplied from China. Disinfectants failed testing, but were still supplied. When nearly all the production documents are in Chinese, it’s hard to know what you are actually getting. There are many high quality suppliers in China, but companies trying to make a buck selling house-brand products to supermarkets will often go to smaller and dodgier manufacturers.