Transport Workers Union national secretary, Tony Sheldon, has condemned Qantas’s training of overseas strikebreakers after the company’s chief executive, Alan Joyce, admitted to the practice in media reports.
Sheldon said in an April 5 media release: “They really need to come clean on who they are training, who is doing the training and why it has to be done in secret in another country? Why are they hiding it around the other side of the world?
“Qantas has said they forecast a 7 per cent increase in international capacity and 8 per cent in domestic – they have the capacity to pay their workforce a decent wage.
“The Royal Bank of Scotland have said they are the best-placed airline in the world when it comes to fuel prices, and Qantas themselves are predicting a massive profit this year.
“Yet management is driven by the ideology that the workforce is a disposable commodity.
“This is not a contingency plan for industrial action — it can only be read as Qantas making a deliberate attack on its workforce and it should be exposed for what it truly is.”