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More than a thousand Qantas engineers went on strike for two hours at major airports around Australia on Monday morning.
Line maintenance engineers from the Qantas Engineers’ Alliance, which comprises the AMWU, AWU and ETU, stopped work from 7am to 9am local time at Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide and Canberra Airports.
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The line maintenance staff, who are responsible for towing and marshalling aircraft as well as performing turnaround checks, joined existing strike action by engines and components maintenance workers.
The engineers, who have been in negotiations with Qantas since April, are looking for a five per cent pay rise per year with 15 per cent in the first year to make up for more than three years of wage freezes. Their current enterprise agreement expired at the end of June.
“These workers hold special and valuable skills that take a decade to build up. They were essential workers during the pandemic, and made sacrifices so Qantas would survive,” said AMWU national secretary Steve Murphy.
“Qantas needs to pay that debt back. Respect your workers, value their skills, pay them what they’re worth.
“As our members say, there are no car parks when you’re 30,000 feet in the air, so these maintenance engineers need to get it right the first time. If Qantas values that safety, it needs to show it values its workers. This is what this dispute is all about.”
ETU national secretary Michael Wright said former Qantas CEO Alan Joyce had “torched” the respect Qantas managers had for engineers, and called on new CEO Vanessa Hudson to reverse course.
“Vanessa Hudson needs to decide whether retaining highly skilled and experienced engineers is a priority for Qantas, or whether it’s more interested in executive bonuses,” he said.
“If Qantas continues to offshore maintenance because they can’t retain enough quality engineers in Australia, the safety implications are obvious.”
Qantas says disruptions because of Monday’s strike were minimal, though weather has caused some delays and cancellations.
“Our teams worked hard to put contingencies in place which meant there were no delays or cancellations to flights this morning as a result of the industrial action, despite incorrect claims from the unions,” a spokesperson said.
“Our teams continue to do a great job helping customers get to their destination safely, particularly over the busy school holiday period.
“We have a number of contingency plans for the remainder of this week’s planed strike action and don’t expect it to impact customers.”
The Flying Kangaroo says it is committed to reaching a deal that improves pay and conditions, including higher pay for apprentices and better career progression opportunities, but believes the engineers’ current demands are unsustainable.
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says:An industrial dispute is like a “domestic”, many nasty and not needed words exchanged all for what? With the QF Engineers they will clearly get something, most likely not what they want but the poor old punter, the customer, is shafted bigtime due to subsequent delays which, in some cases have been “engineered”- (been there etc.). My solution, not new, have a continual CPI wage adjustment each three months, at least that way there can be some cost-of-living maintenance conditions negating hardship on the workers concerned. Give it a try!