Australia's Biggest Airline Grounds Its Entire Fleet

An anonymous reader writes "Australia's national airline QANTAS, famous for never having had a fatal crash, has been grounded effective immediately by its management. The grounding is in response to industrial action by union employees and has stranded passengers all over the world, with 108 planes grounded indefinitely. The Australian Government is seeking an urgent industrial relations hearing in a likely bid to suspend the industrial action and halt further damage to the Australian economy."

Comments

"Post Tech or GTFO!"

[couchslug]

Those who object to non-tech stories polluting this site, speak up and don't post AC when you do it.

Enough. We have sufficient ordinary news sites and don't need that distracting bullshit here.

If it's not a relevant TECHNOLOGY or related story, post that shit somewhere else.

You don't need to post it here. We don't need it here.

"Tech or GTFO!"

Re:"Post Tech or GTFO!"

[Fished]

I disagree. I see several good reasons for Slashdot to post mainstream news and wish they would do more of it. First, slashdot has a unique format. Second, it has a unique community, whose comments on mainstream news I often find insightful (particularly after they're run through the gauntlet if slashdots unique moderation system.). Third, it raises attention to mainstream stories I might otherwise have missed. If you don't like it, just gointo your preferences and filter your categories appropriately.

Interesting

[DaMattster]

I would wager that the protests beginning with Arab Spring have emboldened the 99%ers world-wide to take action against class oppression and start class warfare. Since Occupy Wall Street has gained steam, people are feeling bolder about speaking out and taking non-violent action to make their demands heard. If this means bringing the 1% to its economic knees, so be it. I am a member of the 99% and I have had it with the 1% not only telling me how to live my life economically but with their power to pass ridiculous criminal/civil laws to ensure that they stay in power. I support the 99%ers everywhere.

Re:Interesting

[tgd]

Here's a little fact for you. You ARE a 1%er. The people who are richer than you are not telling you how to live your life economically, they're the ones who are powering the economy that enables you to. And the only reason you're not living in shit-poor poverty working 18 hour days on a farm like people 150 years ago is because there is a literal army of near slaves working around the world.

The Occupy Wallstreet people are massive hypocrites, complaining about the weathy while wearing the clothes that were made in sweatshops filled with workers making $3 a day, sleeping in tents made in the same sweatshops, drinking their coffee brewed from beans picked by people living in crushing poverty.

Here's the cold hard fact that the dimwit protesters don't understand: The average income globally is somewhere in the order of $4000 a year. For every dollar one of those people makes more than that, there's someone making a dollar less than that, in the world. That's how averages work. Either every human being on the planet lives on $4000 a year, or some people will make more. They're just drawing the line in an arbitrary spot that keeps them "okay", nevermind the gap between the people who are making the goods they buy and the protesters themselves is FAR greater in terms of standard of living than between the protesters and the people they're protesting about.

And that is why no amount of protesting by the "middle class" will EVER impact the 1%ers. Because the people protesting are living the high life already -- and they'll learn the VERY hard way when their jeans are $250 and their iPhone costs $2000 what happens when the truely poor people decide they don't want to be poor.

Re:Interesting

[__Paul__]

Bullshit. It's just luck. There's plenty of people who could work the same 6am to 2am hours, get absolutely no-where and then die from exhaustion, wishing they'd spent more time enjoying their lives instead of slaving it away. They could even do exactly the same thing you're doing, but in a different place and time, and could have completely different results.

I wish you well with your business, but if you're successful, it will all be down to blind luck, being in the right place at the right time and knowing the right people, and not the hours you put in.

Re:Interesting

[Tom]

Nonsense, all of it. I'll pick out just some common points:

a) Economy doesn't work on a "fixed average" principle. The thought that for every $ that I make above some arbitrary average (which one, arithmetic, geometric, median? why?) someone else makes a $ less is just bonkers. Apparently, there's somewhere an assumption in there that the total amount of global wages is coming out of one fixed source, i.e. the same bank account pays all wages on the globe, so whenever I take something out, there's less in it.
But the economy doesn't work that way. Economy is not the product of money storage, it is the process of money flow. The $ I make is not vanishing from anywhere, it is going to go somewhere else, i.e. I will be spending it again. Possibly on some sweatshop product. In other word, some poor working is going to get his $ exactly because I got mine first and could spend it. Yes, I realize he's going to get maybe a cent of the $ I spend. But if I hadn't had that $, he wouldn't even have gotten that cent. I didn't take a $ from him, and frankly, if I hadn't gotten the raise and had not gotten my $, do you really think some poor people somewhere else would have gotten it instead?

b) Being well-off does not disallow you to protest against the injustice you see. Having some justice does not preclude you from demanding real justice. That's a stupid argument. Basically, you could tell anyone who protests against anything today that he should up because somewhere someone else is certainly worse off.
It's a trap. It's a "shup up" strategy. Fortunately, the 99% have finally avoided that trap, which has stopped movements for decades. "Think globally, act locally" was a good principle, but not thought through. If you beat me with a stick, that is not ok just because someone somewhere is getting beaten with a bigger stick. I can still demand you stop beating me, and take action to stop you. The argument "someone else is getting beaten worse" is stupid at best.

c) Protests by the middle class are, historically speaking, a ton more effective than protests by the poor. If you look at revolutions throughout history, the ruling class was overthrown way, way more often by the middle class than by the poor. And most often when the middle class and the poor were united against the ruling class. That is when the rulers become afraid, because usually, they position the middle class as a defensive system against the poor - with arguments like yours. That they should be happy with what they have, because others have less. With the addendum that if they want to keep it, they should defend it against the poor. But when the middle class turns around and says "hey, wait. Why fight the poor? You have more than we do, we could take it and split it up between the poor and us, and a lot of people would be very happy" - that's when palaces get stormed and regimes toppled.

d) Sweatshops have a bad rep, but I dare say it is overrated. Oh, I certainly wouldn't want to work there - but a lot of the poor voluntarily do. There are many who leave their farms and go to the cities in order to work in factories. It's a miserable lot, but it beats the alternatives. And that's what so many of us forget when we compare it to our own lives. Sure it would suck to be a factory worker in China today. But China is lifting several millions of its people out of even worse poverty every year. Sweatshops are how it works. Maybe the alternative would be $250 jeans - but it would also mean more poor people, because if the wages are the same in Europe and China, you'd probably buy the jeans from some European company, and the hypothetical chinese factory worker would not end up having the same wage - he would end up having none.
Yes, our desire to buy stuff cheaply is contributing to low wages elsewhere. However, it is also contributing to there being wages for this stuff at all. And those wages would be higher if we would be paying more, yes. They would also be higher if the 1% had a yearly income of, say, 20 ti

Not relevant here

[OzPeter]

I'm an aussie and even I don't think this story deserves to be here. Combined with the prominent slashtervizing and other poor quality stories this place is slowly becoming a news ghetto (and apologies to all who live in ghettos)

Re:No advanced warning?

[Sponge Bath]

...Qantas is playing politics with its customers and screwing its employees.

Quantas is trying to screw the employees. The unions are trying to screw Quantas. The results screw the customers. If the customers are smart, they will vote with their wallets to screw Quantas and the unions.

That is called a cluster fuck.

Re:There's no good guys here

[HalfFlat]

So, don't the other domestic Australian airlines employ people belonging to these unions? Meanwhile Qantas doubles its profits, spends 10 million dollars on a re-branding exercise, and gives a 1.5 million dollar raise to its CEO. Now this current suspension is estimated to be costing them $20 million per day.

If I had to choose a side based on the available evidence, it would not be Qantas' management.

Re:How it should be

[cyber-vandal]

I hope it happens to you and then you'll see exactly how easy and cheap it is to completely change your career path.

Re:There's no good guys here

[Cimexus]

Qantas employees generally already have higher pay and better conditions than equivalent positions at other domestic carriers (Virgin, Jetstar, Tiger) - and FAR more than carriers in almost any foreign country that you could name. Also, Alan Joyce, though just given a $1.5M raise, voluntarily took a $7M/year pay cut previously. So he's just regaining some of what he previously lost (not that that justifies anything, just pointing it out).

AJ is a bit of a dick, but Qantas really is between a rock and a hard place. Or more accurately, Qantas International (the domestic arm is doing fine). QF international is losing money hand over fist through no real fault of their own. The problems are:

1. Geography: Australia is a terminus when it comes to air travel. You don't travel 'through' Australia to get to anywhere else. So you don't have the advantages of being based in a hub, like places in the Middle East or Asia, which can attract substantial traffic from within their catchment area and ALSO a lot of transit traffic (people just passing through in transit to other locations). Australia is the 'end of the road' so to speak, which makes their potential market much smaller.

2. Australia has an open skies policy these days, which has allowed the likes of Singapore Airlines, Qatar, Emirates, Malaysian Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Etihad to operate Australian services. These are airlines that already have the inherent advantages of being based in hub locations (thus are not as reliant on origin-and-departure traffic as Qantas is). They are also airlines that, due to being based in locations with much lower wages than Australia, have costs in the order of HALF what Qantas has, to operate the same flights. Qantas tickets are therefore more expensive. And as a result, noone buys them - Qantas now has only 20% market share for international flights to/from Australia (and falling).

So, QF international is losing money. Their successful domestic arm has been subsidising it, but that can only continue for so long. So what's the solution? They can either start basing at least some of their core maintenance and piloting operations from a hub somewhere in Asia (Singapore, HK etc.) ... or go out of business. This is what Alan Joyce announced earlier this year as a plan to save QF International - moving some operations offshore and creating a new premium airline in Asia. The unions oppose it - they obviously don't want jobs to be lost within Australia, nor do they want their members to miss out on pay or entitlements. Fair enough, from their perspective.

But what would you have Qantas do? They have no choice - if QF International is to survive at all, they MUST significantly reduce their cost base. That would be impossible to do while keeping all existing jobs in Australia. And even more impossible to do if the unions force them to pay even more. They are competing against foreign carriers whose costs are half as much, remember. What a sad thing it would be if Qantas - the second oldest continuously operating international airline in the world - was forced to close its doors.

There really are two sides to this story - the vilification in the media of Qantas as being greedy, un-Australian etc etc. is to some extent unjustified, as they are really running out of options, and noone can force them to keep operating their international arm at a loss.

Re:There's no good guys here

[oztiks]

One word ..... Ansett

The same board of directors that ran Ansett sit on the board of Qantas. Read between the lines, cutting cost / slicing up and selling chunks of the business is an attempt for those very same directors to pocket a little extra cash!

Since when did running a business mean you can ruin lives destroy a proud Australian brand? Those parasites sitting on the board are SELLING assets and pocketing commissions in the process, look at what's happening to the frequent flyer program it's going to Jet Star, WTF?

I understand the union strike, it's well placed and frankly if you're a worker whose proud to wear the Qantas uniform and go to work each day then suddenly have his livelihood destroyed and self pride, I'd be there backing you up!

Did you see the eyes on the CEO when he made the announcement, that asswipe is truly butt hurt and so he should be. He didn't expect the unions to bitch slap him for six!

 

Then the US and EU are obsolute too.....

[RobinEggs]

Unions may have been necessary once, but now the produce nothing but trouble.

So do you want unions abolished? Also, your condemnation doesn't properly apply to unions any more than it does to governments, trade associations, affirmative action groups, militaries, universities, etc. Do you want every one of those organizations abolished, as well? Once people have some power they become deluded enough to invent reasons they should continue holding that level of influence even when many of their aims have been met. They become complacent and guide their attention to unworthy targets. It almost never happens any other way; there's a reason Cincinnatus is a legend to this day, and became a major role model in the forming of the United States.

The solution to greed and complacency is checks and balances, such that an unstable equilibrium can be maintained between competing claimants - including the public - to political and economic influence. Just because that system is no longer tuned correctly doesn't mean it's fundamentally wrong. The total destruction of any organization retaining more power than it currently needs will just leave a nation spending more effort on destroying than on building.

At $5M QANTAS CEO Joyce is vastly overpaid

[CuteSteveJobs]

The CEOs of Singapore and Cathay, better airlines, earn much less than Joyce. Joyce and his executive mates just awarded themselves big fat payrises, but are crying poor to the employees. QANTAS is much owned my institutional investors. It is the executives that have all the power and the big fat paychecks. You might want to check this out: http://www.smh.com.au/business/tough-times-in-the-executive-suites-20110907-1jxpo.html 'The former chief executive of Singapore Airlines, C S Chew, for example, managed to get only between $S1.25 million ($982,000) and $S1.5 million ($1.18 million) in his last nine months at the airline. Cathay Pacific's former chief executive (now International Air Transport Association director general) Tony Tyler was paid $HK11.48 ($1.4 million) in his final full year at the airline. Joyce's $5 million pay packet dwarfed that of the head of Asia's largest airline in terms of fleet size and passenger movements, China Southern. The president of the Guangzhou-based airline, Tan Wangeng , was paid a relatively paltry 1.03 million yuan ($153,000) last year. The entire board of China Southern's supervisors, executive directors and non-executive directors (including Tan) was paid about $855,000 during the same period.'