When it comes to making amends for ruining the travel plans and losing the baggage of tens of thousands of people — who used to be called Qantas passengers but who are now best described as victims — Alan Joyce knows how to pile insult onto injury. His idea of making it up to victims is a $50 voucher for frequent flyers so they can be delayed again and have their luggage lost a little bit more cheaply, and some free passes to sit in Qantas’ overcrowded lounges with hundreds of other frustrated victims while awaiting the lottery result of flight departure.
To his credit, at least Joyce isn’t blaming victims themselves, as he did several months back when he tried to explain away his airline’s profound inadequacies by blaming travellers for failing to get their laptops out of their bags at security screening.
Not that Joyce is accepting any blame himself. “There are good reasons why” so many people have fallen victim to Qantas, Joyce insists. Nothing to do with him, and especially not his disgraceful and, according to the Federal Court, illegal sacking of 1700 baggage handlers in favour of Swiss-domiciled baggage-handler Swissport.
Joyce is continuing to try to have the Federal Court decision overturned in the High Court, even as the consequences of Qantas’ hostility to unions plays out for stranded and baggage-less travellers. There’ll be no apology to baggage handlers summarily sacked during the pandemic.
That’s because Qantas, and Joyce, haven’t changed in the slightest in their hostility to their own staff. Its current pay offer to engineering staff is a 2% rise — coming after a two-year wage freeze — and a $5000 bonus. The offer would leave Qantas workers facing double-digit real wage falls by 2023, and is well below even the current stagnant level of wages growth.
That is, Joyce wants his workers to endure a massive real wage cut while whingeing about how he can’t find workers.
Like many employers who complain about worker shortages, Joyce and Qantas refuse point blank to offer decent wage rises — preferring instead to offer one-off bonuses that do nothing to increase permanent take-home pay and that are a tiny fraction of the ongoing benefits of a permanent wage rise.
There’s a direct link between the seething hatred Joyce and his executives feel toward unions, and the collapse of their airlines’ capacity to provide even a basic transport service despite massive government subsidies and a dominant role in an aviation oligopoly. Every bag lost, every flight delayed, every traveller stranded in a queue is the result of a mindset of contempt for workers from the highest level of management down.
If Joyce is in the mood for an apology, he can start by offering one to his own workers and ex-workers, calling off his High Court action, and giving his staff a decent pay rise. He might have less reason to offer sham compensation to his victims if he did so.
Joyce has been there far too long. It’s past time that he was replaced, hopefully with someone who is competent. And someone who has a more nuanced, inclusive view of human resources than this nasty little neoliberal clone.
…and someone who knows something about aviation and how it is supposed to ‘work’!
There is a simple solution. Sack the Board. Get rid of the contractors. Instead of offering a bonus give the workforce shares in the company. Incorporate empolyee representatives on the Board. All performance bonusus to be apportioned to all staff. ie an inclusive staff. Starting to look like one of those successful German companies.
I’m apparently a Lifetime Gold member of something run by Qantas, due a lot of kilometres back in the day. I had an emergency personal trip to Europe last month and, while there, tried to get back via Qantas. The website kept collapsing under the weight of illogical error messages. There wasn’t an accessible phone number with people attached. So I rang Emirates, who know how to run an airline, and got home last week. Thirty years of brand loyalty gone in a few infuriating hours.
Bernard has hit the nail on the head with ‘sham compensation’.
I do not wish to discount any fare by $50 while knowing Qantas staff are being scr*wed over by Joyce & his management cohorts. $50 sounds like a minor reimbursement per head for the couple billion dollars taxpayers forked out to Qantas for Job Keeper. Offers of a discount or a guest invitation to a Qantas Business lounge anger me. As stated above the lounges are already at capacity & are not the calm environments they were back when Qantas Club was inaugurated around 1993 (or thereabouts). Now they will potentially be packed to the gunwhales & even noisier.
To think that Joyce is currently making a play to take over Alliance, doubtless with the intention of botching yet another airline.
This latest PR exercise has failed. Are marketing experts (alleged) currently advising Joyce – or is this all his own clever work?
Alan Joyce, has no integrity, empathy for Qantas airways employees!….he has intentionally, systematically, outsourced his permanent work force….. with one motive – to glean billions for shareholders and maintain his outrageous, exorbitant, annual salary!!
The token $50 bonus and access to Qantas lounge is ‘tokenism’ at its worst and highly offensive to former airline staff and the Australian flying public!