Corporate Scumbag: Qantas
Qantas is doing well. The world's second-oldest airline boasts more than a thousand flights a day, Australia's largest airline loyalty program and 30,000 staff. In the financial year 1999-2000, Qantas profits soared 15%, from $100.3 million to $762.8 million.
Qantas has a huge social responsibility. Its employees depend on it for their livelihoods, especially since the demise of Ansett. Because of the patchy coverage of air routes by other carriers, many people have little choice but to fly with Australia's once fully publicly owned airline.
But under Australia's "free trade" system, providing tens of thousands of people with an income and hundreds of thousands of others with essential transport is not considered a responsibility. Qantas is simply a profit-making venture.
This was proved beyond doubt when Ansett's crash threatened the jobs and entitlements of 6000 staff and many Ansett travellers' tickets were cancelled. Yet the Australian government and Qantas refused to help. An unprofitable industry is considered a dead branch to be pruned, regardless of its workers' and customers' rights.
The Qantas despots also trample on workers' rights. Despite a 93% vote by Qantas' underpaid maintenance workers to oppose their wages being frozen, Qantas continues to demand a 12-month freeze.
Worse still, Qantas makes no guarantee of a wage increase at the end of the freeze. Any increase will be conditional on the workers' improved performance.
The demand for a freeze is based on Qantas' executive general manager David Forsyth's faulty premise that Qantas has to make cutbacks due to the "extraordinary state of the global and domestic aviation industries". Such sophistry dissolves quickly. It has previously been shown that Qantas profit margins remain high.
Another corner being cut is workers' training. After all the media hype surrounding the September 11 terrorist attacks, you would expect that the aviation industry would be tightening its security. In January, the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers Union conducted a national survey that showed that most Qantas employees have not been trained in the basic recognition of dangerous goods.
BY KARL HAND
[The author is a member of Resistance.]
From Green Left Weekly, February 13, 2002.
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