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.
