Qantas: The Stitch-up of Australia

A recent anti-industrial relations campaign led by Qantas CEO Alan Joyce showcases the open contempt big business has towards Australian workers

Qantas CEO Alan Joyce explains massive staff cuts on the ABC in 2020 (Source: YouTube)

Alan Joyce was seen walking the corridors of parliament, like none of us can, visiting all he could to lobby against Labor’s new IR bill. Joyce has become the face of opposition on behalf of many industry groups, using his self-perceived prestige to make friends and influence people in a country that is seeing the standards of living drop across the board. The patience of Australians for people like Joyce is rapidly diminishing.

Joyce is the highest paid pound-for-pound CEO journeyman in this country’s history. His company has taken many Australians for a ride, and more recently it has not been on the seat of an airliner. Joyce laid off 2,500 employees in August 2021, somewhere between lockdowns and Jobkeeper, subcontracting their careers and pride in the Qantas product to a labour-hire model, adding to the broadside that he had inflicted on the 20,000 staff that were stood down from the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. Now he fights his own loyal workers need for a living wage, and as he makes his threats and demands in Canberra, he is even looking to strip overtime payments to 1,300 of his staff. His company just recently announced a $1b profit boom in six weeks.

Qantas has been at the cutting edge of gaming the current IR landscape to overwhelmingly favour the employer, including the use of twenty-one subsidiary companies to divide and conquer its once proud workforce. Multi-employer bargaining may seem like the harbinger of doom for the powerful executive arbiters of our happiness, as it clearly does for people like Joyce, but it is the very least that millions of Australian workers need to survive. This open-pitched battle led by Joyce and the executive masters of our universe is an insensitive and demeaning attack on the true value of Australian labour and on the working class, all for the sake of higher profits and corporate bonuses, and it comes at the expense of the Australian way of life.

In the suburb of Tullamarine, that sits against Melbourne International Airport, many of its residents, many of whom have had multi-generational connections to servicing the airline industry that roars above their houses were devastated to be stood down without pay, and justifiably angry when offered the same jobs back for a much lower pay packet and worse conditions. Since Howard, consecutive LNP Governments have waged war against the unions and their members, weakening their ability to earn a fair wage in the face of soaring corporate profits. Workers like these across Australia, without whom there would be no service and manufacturing industries to power the country, have been unable to lobby in Canberra like their corporate employers can. And who, until now, would listen to them anyway?

Sally McManus @sallymcmanus

Alan Joyce walking the corridors of Parliament He wants Labor's IR laws dumped No pay rise for you Big bonus for him

Michele O'Neil @MicheleONeilAU

@sallymcmanus Can verify sighting walking the corridors of Parliament House

As the battle lines are being drawn, as open threats from industry threaten to run derogatory ad campaigns, as the wheels are falling off for more and more Australian families, the Reserve Bank of Australia weighs in to tell Australians not to expect much of a pay rise. Governor Phillip Lowe, himself on an adjusted $911,000 retainer, went a step further to suggest "If we all buy into the idea that wages have to go up to compensate people for inflation it will be painful”. “So best avoid that”, he told us. The man that presided over the RBA at a time of consistently inconsistent interest-rate guarantees that slapped on halves on top of percents on what were meant to be quarters, and threw out the fragile and over-loaned household budgets of millions, this guy is telling us to sit tight and bear it. And he does all of this, along with the government, without a mention of the blistering corporate profits that help drive this inflation.

So, we all get ready for the variable and unpredictable inflation Lowe warns us about, we take our personal responsibility and bunker down, but we also witness the CEO class like Joyce accessing our political representatives for influence, running companies who employ many of us, preparing to wage an open campaign against its very own Australian working class. Many of these companies pay no taxes to the governments that should ensure their economic contributions to our national prosperity, they lever themselves into the metrics of productivity that motivate our treasuries, and they shit on the workers on whose backs they are carried to record profits.

Everyone expects the news to define the moral outrage, and it always falls short. We hope at the ballot box for the governments to set things straight with our wages, and we find ourselves screaming into a void when treasurers talk about the Reserve Bank and wars in Ukraine and realistic limitations for working people while CEO pay and company profits soar on an endless thermal current of hot air. Underneath the strained surface of Australian life, the mechanisms that preserved our society’s stability, that we once took for granted, are changing by the day, reflected in the visible strains of a cost-of-living crisis and the quantities of minor party and independent voting cards that now pack the letterboxes of the voting public.

Imposing a reasonable system of multi-employer bargaining on the profit laden big employers is barely a start, and offsets that role the government plays in resolving a gaping imbalance that threatens to unravel the fabric of our society. Australians hear all this talk from treasurers and RBA governors of austerity and inflation, war and personal responsibility – but no mention of the immoral corporate profits that put us here and the almost total avoidance of corporate taxes, leaving the tax burden with the working class.   

Doug Cameron @DougCameron51

Good on ⁦@senator_sheldon⁩ for calling out Qantas boss Alan Joyce. Joyce gets a huge bonus for destroying the livelihood of thousands of employees and trashing the reputation of Qantas. Unmitigated greed and opportunism being put before decency and respect for workers!

The baggage handlers and flight staff, cleaners, engineers, and attendants who make up the backbone of the airline industry in places like Tullamarine, and the millions of underpaid workers working for bosses who openly fight against their need for a living wage across the country — these people have been denied the opportunity to call on parliamentarians in their Canberra bubbles. As Australian workers see Alan Joyce and his ilk strolling unimpeded into the offices of the people we elect to represent us, when they see the watered-down legislation that goes through a bipartisan de-fanging and a subjective media approval process, many can’t help but notice the malignancy that continues to grow that threaten to knock a section of people in this society to oblivion.

So now, the job is left with the Government to legislate for fairness in the face of blistering opposition by the fat end of town. And to do so with aplomb and public support. Because currently, with all the vacancies, low wages and childish belligerence from the employer class who sit on record pandemic profits boosted by disproportionate Jobkeeper assistance, the business councils still take a ticket before the unions, the major parties still see citizens productivity over their prosperity. And the logarithmic graphs widen, nonetheless. The work forces that have been stood down without pay, indefinitely, those told to come back to work for less at companies that deliver record shareholder dividends year-on-year riding on the backs of their loyalty, the millions of Australians on insecure pay in insecure jobs, what happens to them next?