Think the recent holiday chaos at airports was bad? Well things could be about to get much worse with a potential baggage handlers’ strike on the cards at airports across the east coast of Australia.
The Transport Workers’ Union will apply to the Fair Work Commission today to vote on strike action over a new workplace agreement with Australia’s largest baggage handling company, Emirates-owned dnata. A strike would affect 20 airlines — including Qantas, Etihad and Singapore Airlines — and thousands of travellers.
A leaked memo from dnata shows the kind of pressure staff are under to work harder and faster in ever-worsening conditions.
The memo claimed that aircraft and safety equipment have been damaged as a result of shortcuts and understaffing that is widespread in airports and with airlines since travel began again in full force. The company also said unsafe behaviour has resulted in several safety incidents in the past fortnight and warned staff to push back on any “pressure from airline reps” or managers to work faster.
Sydney airport among the world’s worst
The potential strike comes as Sydney airport is named among the worst airports in the world by flight tracking and data platform FlightAware. Sydney came in at sixth in the world for cancellations and ninth for delays, with 34.2% of flights affected by delays in the past two months.
And with darkly humorous timing, yesterday hundreds of passengers at Sydney airport were forced to line up outside on a chilly July morning as thick fog wreaked havoc for airlines.
Last week the ABC reported that Australia as a whole had recorded its worst flight cancellation and performance rate since such records began, with only 63% of Qantas, Virgin, Jetstar and Rex flights hitting their arrival time in June; 61.9% departed on time.
Qantas CEO keeps ‘Joycing’ it up
Australia’s national carrier, Qantas, and its CEO, Alan Joyce, have been at the centre of Australian airport chaos since travellers began taking to the skies again.
As Bernard Keane wrote in Crikey last month, Joyce spent the pandemic clamouring to return to the skies, only to utterly fail to provide the most basic services effectively: on-time flights, luggage that arrives with the passenger, and decent customer service.
Joyce has received a lot of criticism for his approach, particularly given he illegally sacked thousands of baggage handlers during the pandemic and then outsourced their jobs.
Last month Crikey asked our readers to share tales of Qantas woe to catalogue the many ways Joyce had failed and we were overwhelmed with stories of lengthy delays, cancellations with zero notice and zero attempts at assistance, luggage travelling halfway around the world without its passenger, and hours upon hours of travellers’ time spent in the black hole of customer service with a satisfactory outcome rarely reached.
Just this week, Crikey reader Glenn got in touch about a Qantas disaster. After receiving a text and email telling him his flight to Darwin was delayed by over an hour and a half, he arrived at the new time to check in to find his flight had taken off at the original time.
“I lost five days of consulting work in Darwin and had to pay other expenses,” he told Crikey.
And he’s not alone. Last week Dave Noonan, nationwide secretary of the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union, tweeted that Joyce has entered the lexicon as a byword for travel chaos.
Meanwhile, despite Australian airports and carriers being in worse shape than ever, the travel industry appears to be bouncing back strongly. Flight Centre has announced it was transacting similar values month-by-month that it transacted before the pandemic.
Hopefully, the airlines don’t Joyce it up.
Telling that in Australia, workers, via their union, have to “apply to the FWC to *take a vote* on taking strike action”.
When I went through this, the requirements were to inform the FWC and employer of what action(s) you planned to take, get approval from the FWC to *take a vote* of members, with a postal ballot, requiring an absolute majority of members to vote in favour.
Of course, the FWC could deny permission to hold a freakin ballot and the employer could legally challenge the taking of the ballot via appeal. Grounds could include impairment to business…
well, yeah.
Then you just had to convince enough members to fill in postal forms and return them on time. Who even uses snail mail these days?
If successful, we got to take such radical action as wearing badges with slogans on our uniforms. Terrifying for employers, I know. /S
And then the employer can just skip the whole process by unilaterally terminating your EBA and reverting to the national employment standards (bare minimum) or like my previous employer, attempt to go outside the FW system and go below even that.
The system I’ve experienced is completely unbalanced.
‘Joyced’, a neat adaptation into the English language. It can be used as a verb, adverb, adjective. The Qantas CEO has spent years earning it & is now left with a Joyced staff.
‘Oh Australia let us Re-Joyce
For we are running late
With…..’
Can someone fill in the rest for me?
‘our home is girt by greed’…
Our flight is shown as boarding now
And we don’t know what gate
The usual zero-sum-game of greed. The upper echelons of QANTAS (including pilots) can’t fill their pocket’s unless the baggage handlers pocket’s are empty. Ironically, the little Irishman reeks of Maggie Thatcher.