bill shorten

an interview with Bill Shorten

SB: Bill, you referred a bit earlier to productivity in workplaces. One of the key business complaints about the way the Fair Work Act works, and I suppose it’s most notably demonstrated in the Qantas dispute, is that it appears that the unions are taking advantage of the wider scope of the Act to intervene in matters that businesses would be more properly the domain of management.

BS: Well, in terms of Qantas, let’s go to what the real bug bear was in Qantas. There was the management grounding a hundred airplanes, stranding tens of thousands of passengers and thousands of staff all over the world. I’ve done three enterprise agreement negotiations for Qantas in my old life. They have never been easy. Bargaining is never easy. Anyone who has done a serious commercial negotiation knows that. What I think made Qantas such an outstandingly unusual act was that I’d never seen an airline ground all its airplanes before.

SB: Given the choice of dying slowly or creating a confrontation than putting it in to the Fair Work Tribunal. What would you have done?

BS: So, why didn’t Qantas come to the government? Why didn’t Qantas flag they were going to ground the airplanes without actually inconveniencing thousands of people? Why couldn’t they have given 72 hours notice and said ‘right, this is what we’re going to do’, and they couldn’t have run all the same arguments?

SB: My understanding of the first part of that answer was that the Qantas board was given advice that it wasn’t legal for them to actually approach the government directly.

BS: I don’t agree with that advice. I haven’t seen that advice. If you’ve seen it, I’m not privy to it. I’ve done a thousand negotiations, Stephen. I don’t like wildcat actions by anyone. It doesn’t matter if you’re a worker or an employer. If a trade union in Australia had stopped a hundred planes flying, had stranded tens of thousands of passengers in Australia and overseas, thousands of airline staff overseas and in Australia, I don’t think they’d be getting the pats on the back … Just to bring it to a head. Say Qantas was negotiating for six months and wouldn’t budge, and were doing things like cutting overtime, and a union did the same thing Qantas did, would you be as harsh on the union or as nice on the union as you are on Qantas?

SB: I think that kind of downplays the impact that the campaign was having and would have had.

BS: But no, I’m actually saying let’s not have one rule for one in judgement and another rule for another. The Government would have intervened regardless of who had done that dramatic, draconian action. Secondly, what was to stop Qantas at least giving people notice? I actually think the passengers might have if Qantas wanted to square off and say we don’t like this action, but why not give people the notice? Why keep a mum away from her kid, a single parent mum flight attendant in Honolulu from her child? Why not give people 72 hours notice, take it to the Commission? They could have done that.

In fact the union would never have grounded the airline bcoz it is not allowed to by law.

But the airline can take such drastic unecessary action and get away with it!

Management still have a lot to answer for by disrupting 1000s of pax, and costing QF over $100M.

but instead they get a bonus!

Bizarre ! GLTA@QF !