Domino effect: qantas strikes
Nearly 200 Qantas airline engineers have gone on strike this morning in the latest act of industrial defiance by employees in critical service sectors...
Just hours after striking Australia Post workers were ordered back to work and a week after Queensland Rail employees walked off the job over government asset sales, 190 maintenance engineers in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne stopped work at 6am today.
They are threatening a series of rolling strikes for up to five days at a time throughout December and January in protest over pay and working conditions.
The action coincides with a 12-day British Airways cabin crew strike that is tipped to throw Christmas holiday travel into chaos in the UK and affect up to 1 million passengers worldwide.
Qantas yesterday admitted passengers booked to travel to the UK on 22 flights from Brisbane International Airport could experience disruptions, due to the Australian carrier's codeshare agreement with BA.
The company was on the back foot again this morning, assuring customers the engineers' strike would have no impact on Christmas and New Year scheduling.
The stopwork also involves Jetstar engineers.
"About 190 out of 5000 engineers are striking and these engineers work in our offices and don't do technical work," a Qantas spokesman said.
"As we definitely still have enough technical expertise on the ground, our services should not be disrupted."
He said the strike was largely due to disagreements about pay rates which had been an ongoing battle for the airline.
"The engineers are asking for a 26 per cent pay rise over three years with a 17 per cent increase in the first year, but we think this is excessive.
"We're negotiating in good faith with the engineers and we're confident we can resolve this issue."
However, the Association of Professional Engineers, Scientists and Managers Australia, which represents the employees, said Qantas' professional engineers formed a "small but crucial" part of its workforce and as such, Qantas services could be disrupted.
It says the engineers were responsible for "maintaining the safety and airworthiness of the Qantas fleet and must sign off on any significant maintenance work before Planes are allowed to fly."
"The stopwork periods will inevitably have an impact on Qantas maintenance schedule and may impede the airline's ability to put Planes in the air, especially in January," APESMA senior industrial officer Alison Rose said.
"We ask passengers to understand that this industrial action has been taken reluctantly and is the result of management stubbornness."
Ms Rose denied engineers were asking for a 26 per cent pay rise; rather, they were concerned about professional recognition and fatigue management which Qantas was refusing to negotiate on.
"I'd be loathe to call this a stalemate but no meetings have been scheduled with Qantas," Ms Rose said.
"What we would ideally like however is a good, robust fatigue management policy which will allow engineers sufficient rest as well as sufficient training in this very rapidly changing field."
Source: brisbanetimes.com.au