Ben Courtice, Melbourne
Qantas Airways, Australia's major airline, announced on March 9 that it will close its Sydney Airport heavy maintenance base for its fleet of Boeing 747s, sack 480 workers, and transfer 140 of the positions to Brisbane and to Melbourne's Avalon airport.
The announcement was "a bitter victory" for Qantas workers after the company's previous threats to send all maintenance work to other countries, according to union delegate Ian Johnson, who also warned that Qantas has not yet abandoned these plans.
Johnson, a delegate for the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU) at Qantas' maintenance operations at Melbourne's Tullamarine airport, told Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly that he doesn't see how an extra 70 jobs at Avalon and Brisbane can take on all the work from the Sydney base. He said that he could foresee situations where work that could not be done at Avalon would be sent overseas regardless.
Nevertheless, he believed that union action appeared to have forced Qantas to announce its decision more quickly. The Qantas unions' industrial and community campaign was launched at the beginning of the month with maintenance workers' rallies at Sydney and Melbourne airports, and a rally of 400 AMWU delegates on March 8 outside Qantas' offices in Melbourne.
Qantas also announced a six-month review of operations at Tullamarine, and is threatening to re-open the question of sending work to other countries in 2008 when it reviews its maintenance operations again.
2008 is also when the federal government will review whether it allows Singapore Airlines to compete with Qantas on the lucrative Sydney-Los Angeles route.
Johnson said that since the question of all maintenance jobs going overseas is no longer at the forefront, the unions will now fight to defend conditions through their enterprise agreement (EA) campaign, rather than public campaigning on the issue of job losses.
Qantas is demanding that Tullamarine maintenance workers give up key conditions in their EA that will bring them closer to the level of the workers at Avalon. The maintenance workers at Avalon are all employed by labour hire firm Forstaff.
Johnson said that Qantas wants workers at Tullamarine to agree to overtime banking, whereby overtime is "banked" and may be used like time-in-lieu when workers are stood down during slow periods. This arrangement is already in place at Avalon.
Qantas is also looking to introduce "flexible" work arrangements including casual, part-time and fixed-term employment; cashing in all rostered days off; rostered days off to be set quarterly; and regular work hours to be averaged over six months at management's discretion (allowing some weeks to be longer than 38 hours, and others less, without going into overtime penalty rates).
Against the threats to workers' jobs and conditions, AMWU assistant national secretary Glenn Thompson stated in a March 8 media release that the union is "not going to engage in bargaining that will reduce terms and conditions. Qantas is the world's most profitable airline with the best maintenance record." Qantas CEO Geoff Dixon is on $6.1 million a year.
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, March 15, 2006.
Visit the