An international airline, shut down with no forewarning during an international meeting of heads of state, because this fuckstick is trying to play hard ball with the unions. He’s costing the company $20 million per day, and that’s before you take into account the destruction of goodwill people had with the company before he came along to screw everything up.
Qantas shouldn’t just be offering refunds for arbitrarily deciding not to give its customers the service they paid and planned for, they should be offering this man’s head on a pike.
It’s completely unreal. I don’t know how much of a pain in the arse the labour disputes are, but dear god that is some seriously shitty senior management. It’s blackmail and inconveniencing thousands.
The Australian government’s workplace relations tribunal, Fair Work Australia, ordered the shutdown terminated about an hour ago. Planes should start flying again after 9 a.m. Australian Eastern Standard Time, which is about 6 hours from now.
See the Sydney Morning Herald link provided by C3.
Your opinion, however I also think that this dispute is no business of the government at all and it should leave the parties involved to resolve their differences, use of the judiciary is only going to make things more bitter, and ‘talking head’ politicians should remember that their job is to govern, not interfere in industry.
Qantas management and the unions have every right to make their own decisions, and their own mistakes if that is how it winds up.
And yet, it is every government’s business to step in when public interests are at stake, and they clearly are when transportation and economic interests are involved.
No, they don’t. As the saying goes, your right to swing your fist ends at my nose. Even if industrial action provides a loophole in the legal obligation to not bail on the services you agreed to provide for no good reason, you still have a moral obligation not to yank tens of thousands of innocent bystanders around.
Damn straight. CEO’s salaries have been stagnating while union labor costs are going up and productivity is going down. Or maybe it’s the opposite, I can’t remember.
So, unions want raises of 2 to 5% for workers - and Joyce has just given himself a raise of something like 70%, while saying that unions are asking too much.
I believe that Joyce has done a major disservice to the company with the shutdown. As industrial commentators are saying, Qantas has had a brand loyalty since its inception that has been second to none in the world. With the latest fiasco, many are now questioning that loyalty and Qantas might find itself seriously challenged in the marketplace.
Oh, and fuck you Joyce. Hope you choke on yer’ payrise.
Carrots for bosses, sticks for workers. That’s how the economy is supposed to work.
The geniuses who run our corporations can only do so if they are tempted by massive incentives. They understand that being handed massive paychecks places a heavy responsibility on their shoulders, even if there are no actual consequences for fucking things up.
The plebs, though, aren’t sophisticated enough to appreciate this sort of system. They need to be beaten like the rented mules that they are in order to prevent them from simply lying around while they’re supposed to be working. Some of them occasionally suggest that things need to change, but the boss knows better, and is committed to doing something about it just as soon as he gets the Board to approve his pay hike and extra stock options.
Some of the mom-and-pop shareholders don’t like the pay rises for the bigwigs, and also believe in giving the workers a fair paycheck, but those folks are outvoted in shareholder meetings by institutional investors, generally comprised of people who look and act pretty much the same as the guys on the Board of Directors, and who have about as much empathy for the schlubs on salary.
My issue is that 70,000 people are now stuck where they don’t want to be. For most it’s an inconvenience but for others it could prove traumatic (funerals, missed connections, ruined holidays, lost pay, etc.). Qantas is having its name dragged through the mud, losing US $70 per day in operating costs but untold millions in damage to brand traction. Many will remember this incident when it comes to their next high price ticket purchase. It’s the national carrier and is doing Australia’s reputation no good either. Whatever the issues and however intransigent the unions may or may not be, this is a rotten way for the management to handle it.
*Australia’s Qantas Airways returned to the air on Monday after grounding its entire global fleet over the weekend in a bold tactic to force the government to intervene in the nation’s worst labour dispute in a decade.
*
Not knowing Joyce, I can’t say much about him. I can say that…
(A) The man does not understand public relations very well, since he accepted a big raise just before doing this. I rather wonder if he’s half-mad, since there’s desire to success, thre’s greed, and there’s sheer insanity.
(B) He may have a point. I doubt very much it’s the employee raises which are the issue. What I immediately noticed on that list of demands was that the unions wanted Quantas to commit to using existing union employees for servicing and other work. This is where things get really irritating for corporations - if I were CEO of anything I’d be much mroe willing to pay high wages than deal with constant nitpicking rules and commitments set way beforehand.
Or in other words, it is really irritating for corporations when unions try to prevent corporations from taking steps break union solidarity and power (by introducing the use of non-union workers) so that in the future the union will become powerless or non-existent, and the top management will be able to shit all over their workers just as they please.
I’d say it’s just a lee’l more complicated than that.
First off, I don’t accept that the union has some magic right to demand the corporation continue using their services. But further, this adds all kinds of headaches and complexity to the work process, makes things take longer, and reduces competitiveness. Frankly, I’ve known and met company owners who basically were willign to go out of business if a union made a serious play - not because of wages, but because it simply wasn’t worth it to keep working if they had to deal with arcane union work rules, controls over promotion, and whatever obnoxious scheduling was demanded.
Employees have the right to get paid (fairly) for their work. They don’t have a right to dictate how that work gets done. That’s what contractors do, and they have very different rules for a reason.