AFTER DRAWN-OUT negotiations over a new Enterprise Bargaining Agreement (EBA) for Qantas staff, a major union recently advised its members to accept the latest workplace agreement after the airline allayed fears that it was going to move about 7,000 jobs offshore
AFTER DRAWN OUT negotiations over a new Enterprise Bargaining Agreement (EBA) for Qantas staff, a major union recently advised its members to accept the latest workplace agreement after the airline allayed fears that it was going to move about 7,000 jobs offshore.
Qantas CEO Geoff Dixon recently indicated the airline couldn’t afford to keep up with competitors who had lowered costs by sourcing up to 30 per cent of staff overseas.
“We have said for the past three years that we must source more people overseas and that our continued growth of jobs in Australia depended on that,” he said.
If international benchmarks were followed, Dixon indicated that more than 7,000 jobs would move overseas.
“We reserve the right to make the necessary decisions to source the best possible locations for people, services and products,” he said
The Australian Services Union (ASU) reacted angrily to the comments, asking Qantas to clarify its positions and reveal if there were any definite plans for retrenchments in a letter to Kevin Brown, Qantas’ executive general manager, people.
The letter asked if any ASU staff would be affected and pointed to the fact that no productivity improvements aimed at stopping outsourcing were put to the ASU in any EBA negotiations.
Qantas, however, said that “no areas of ASU covered work are ‘targeted’ for offshoring” and that the airline had “no plans for wholesale redundancies”.
The ASU, which represents about 10,500 Qantas staff, welcomed the carrier’s comments, albeit somewhat warily.
“The Qantas Group, as we know, is always reviewing its options on everything – the amount of change we have seen in the last few years has been significant,” the ASU said.
Some union members suggested they might vote against their EBA because of the possibility of outsourcing Qantas jobs, but the ASU did not think this was justified.
The new EBA is a rollover of the previous agreement which expired in June last year, and members would receive a three per cent pay rise each year for three years if the agreement is accepted.
The Flight Attendants Association (FAA) also encouraged Qantas to avoid the offshoring of any jobs.
“In the context of an airline making record profits, and probably becoming the most profitable in the world, they need to reassess the plan to offshore jobs,” said FAA secretary Michael Mijatov.
