ACTU Media

Qantas Workers Deserve Better

Unions Condemn Qantas Pay Offer

ACTU Media Release Wednesday 21 May 2008

Unions condemn Qantas proposal for a real pay cut as a recipe for lower service & standards for passengers.

Unions representing the aviation industry met today and resolved to condemn Qantas’ current pay offer for maintenance engineers as inadequate and a recipe for lower services and standards at the airline.

The unions also condemned reports that Qantas was planning to use a squad of strike breakers in the dispute.

The Qantas unions resolved to:

1. Support the campaign by the ALAEA for a fair wage outcome for the airline’s maintenance engineers.
2. Call on Qantas to accept that the ALAEA members have rejected the airline’s current pay offer of 3% as inadequate.
3. Reject statements by Qantas management that a pay claim above 3% is excessive.
4. Request the ACTU provide practical assistance to the ALAEA during the dispute.
5. Call on Qantas management to negotiate fairly with the airline’s unions to take account of factors such as:

· Current CPI levels

· Productivity, skills and responsibilities

· Profitability of the airline

· Comparable settlements in other enterprises

ACTU President Ms Sharan Burrow said:

“Qantas is profitable because of the professionalism and commitment of its staff.

“If Qantas management cuts the pay and conditions of its staff then workers are concerned that service and standards at the airline will suffer.

Qantas management is currently offering the airline’s maintenance engineers a pay cut in real terms.

The company is taking a tough line in pay negotiations with its workforce despite expecting a massive 40 per cent increase in profits this year – a record $1.5 billion profit is predicted.

Management of the airline was exposed last week to have engaged a squad of strike-breakers in preparation for a drawn out industrial dispute.

Media contact: Shannon Walker ph 0414 694 476

Burrow targets ‘obscene corporate greed’

Turbulance … Sharan Burrow says Qantas workers are being asked to take a real pay cut (AAP: Mick Tsikas)

• Audio: ACTU boss critical about Aust’s wage restraint (AM)

One of the concerns in fighting inflation in Australia is keeping the lid on wage demands.

This morning Australian Council of Trade Unions president Sharan Burrow is going into talks with Qantas unions about their claim for a wage rise.

But Ms Burrow isn’t happy with the way wage restraint is being handled in Australia.

On the one hand she says she’s battling to get a small wage increase of above 3 per cent for Qantas employees, while elsewhere corporate bosses in Australia are getting obscene payouts.

Yesterday it was announced the outgoing head of the Macquarie Group, Allan Moss, will receive a $50 million payout package.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported last September that Qantas chief Geoff Dixon received a salary of $6,700,000 for the financial year of 2006-2007.

Ms Burrow spoke on AM to chief political correspondent Lyndal Curtis.

SHARAN BURROW: I don’t think anybody deserves $50 million. It is so far beyond what working Australians can even grasp as reality, that it is just now a level of obscenity to see the greed of CEOs.

When you consider that we have got a dispute with Qantas and their management gets millions of dollars – between $3 million and $7 million as a base salary – and yet they’re trying to tell workers to take a real pay cut, to take 3 per cent.

LYNDAL CURTIS: But Mr Moss is running a pretty successful company. It has profit nearly $2 billion this financial year. Surely he is being paid what his company thinks he is worth?

SHARAN BURROW: Working Australians, I must say, I was speechless. I’m sure they’ll do the same thing and when you come back again to the kind of, you know, fair go at the bargaining table, we say to these CEOs, you can’t possibly earn so much beyond what you are prepared to pay in increases for working Australians and think that somehow that is fair enough.

LYNDAL CURTIS: But isn’t the reality that when the Reserve Bank looks at wage outcomes, it is not looking at a handful of CEOs or managers, it’s looking at a broader scope of the population and that it’s concerned that higher wages have the prospect to fuel inflation and could result in an interest rates rise?

SHARAN BURROW: Surely we haven’t lost our moral compass to the point where people can take away tens of millions of dollars in salary every year and yet the very workers who have made their companies profitable, don’t get a fair deal, don’t get a fair share of those profits.

LYNDAL CURTIS: Do you accept though that there is a risk if you’re pushing for higher wages for workers that the Reserve Bank might see that as inflationary and slam on the brakes through another interest rate rise?

SHARAN BURROW: There can be no economic sanity if working families can’t pay their bills. So if we’ve got such a rich nation and yet only the mega-rich can take from that pool of shares and built worth and working Australians can’t get a pay rise that maintains their living standards, that allows them to pay the bills, something is very, very wrong about that

 

Qantas sets the standard in New Price Fixing Policy

Price Fixer Jailed

David Nason and Steve Creedy | Published in The Australian News May 10, 2008

COLLEAGUES of a former Qantas executive facing an eight-month jail term for his part in an international freight cartel have accused the airline of leaving him “like a shag on a rock” to face the US Justice Department.

US-based former Qantas freight vice-president Bruce McCaffrey, who was also fined $US20,000 ($21,250) after pleading guilty this week to fixing international air cargo rates, is believed to be the first player in the global scam to face jail.

But in the Los Angeles air cargo community where McCaffrey has been an aloof but respected fixture for the best part of 20 years, there is stunned disbelief at the turn of events.

There the US-born McCaffrey, 65, is known as a determined, hard-working man who carries himself with the solemnity of a funeral director and who has a sense of humour to match.

Never married, McCaffrey is without extravagant tastes, has few if any close friends and suffers from poor health, the result of a severe stroke in the mid-1990s that left him with a limp, an arm that doesn’t function properly, a hand that can’t grip anything and a face paralysed down one side.

Adding to his woes, his mother died recently.

These misfortunes, along with a realisation that McCaffrey may end being up one of the few jailed over the price-fixing scam, are feeding hostility towards Qantas and its most senior executives over the company’s decision not to fund legal representation for the six Qantas employees being investigated by US authorities.

“I say shame on Qantas,” says Julian Keeling, proprietor of Consolidated International, a Los Angeles-based freight forwarding company specialising in the South Pacific and Australasia, and editor of a popular industry newsletter.

“You’ve got a guy like Bruce who’s suffered a major stroke, who is not a well guy, who was at the office at 7am every morning and the last to leave at night, and who now, at age 65 and after 40 years in the cargo business, is going to jail. It’s just disgusting. Qantas owes Bruce a debt.”

According to Mr Keeling and Peter Burn, a former head of Air New Zealand’s US cargo business, McCaffrey took the Justice Department plea bargain offer because he didn’t have the resources to fight Uncle Sam.

McCaffrey, who lives in the Los Angeles suburb of Redondo Beach, did not return calls yesterday.

Qantas was yesterday keeping a low profile about its former employee, saying it could not comment while the case was before the courts. But a lawyer involved in a class action against Qantas and other airlines said McCaffrey’s jailing showed how seriously authorities were taking the case and the Australian carrier’s illegal actions.

“To date, Qantas has made no offer to pay back the overcharges paid by the thousands of businesses in Australia that use international air freight,” Maurice Blackburn lawyer Kim Parker said yesterday. “We will hope this will send a signal to Qantas that it is time to talk to their customers and to make good the widespread damage from this price-fixing cartel.”

It also seems unlikely that five other executives exempted from a $US61 million plea agreement between Qantas and the Justice Department will be forced back to the US to face jail. Because there is no jail term for cartel conduct in Australia, experts believe extradition is unlikely.