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March strike madness did nothing to enhance the image of aviation to the travelling public.
Maybe it was the imminent presence of Alley’s Comet or a good ol’ dose of the full moon but the various aviation-affiliated trade unions certainly turned on a fair dose of triviality during the month of March. In terms of making the average Australian wince, it was hard to beat the spectre of the entire Ansett Australia-wide fleet being grounded during the busy Easter period because male flight attendants were not able to wear short-sleeved shirts, like their female counterparts. Personally, I don’t think most people care if they wear long or short sleeve shirts, but to publicly threaten to ground the entire airline and deliberately scuttle tens of thousands of long-awaited family reunions and holidays by their fellow Australians over such an unbelievably trivial issue is beyond understanding.
If the population was a little amused by the antics of the Ansett tea boys then their cousins at Qantas may have been guilty of inspiring them to such bravado when once more the issue of unsanitary hot towels raised its ugly, if not boring head. The result of this was several cancelled OF flights, much-lost revenue by OUR national airline and another kick in the face for those people who chose to support the national flag carrier. Experts tell us that rabies, leprosy and AIDS antibodies do not habituate in the security of the towels and with the millions of people the world over who hygienically use these same towels each month without suffering plague, it is only a very gullible person who really believes the fount of the problem lies with the matter of handling supposedly unhygienic towels! While again there has to be more to this story then meets the eye, it still serves to merely turn people away from air travel and help slow the economic stability of one of our more important foreign exchange-earners. And so the month rolled on right up to the Transport Workers Union efforts to ground Ansett Australia-wide. This did not occur thankfully owing to the hard-working efforts of staff who kept much of the carrier flying through what should have been its second largest peak travel period of the year. TWU refuellers and baggage handlers in Sydney, the hub of the national sector grid, kept the strike alive though through Easter when they demanded they be paid for the time they were on strike, in addition to objecting to staff having performed their job in an effort to keep the airline operational. Again, much travel disruption and thousands of holiday plans scuttled through the sheer greed and bully-boy attitudes of another of Australia’s more infamous militant unions.
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